Summary: A new study shows that infants use their mother’s scent to enhance face recognition, and that this multisensory advantage changes dramatically between four and twelve months of age.
Researchers observed that younger infants rely more on maternal odor to recognize faces, while older infants increasingly depend on visual information alone. The results emphasize the role of early multisensory exposure in shaping perceptual and cognitive development.
Key Facts:
- Maternal scent boosts infants’ face recognition, especially at younger ages.
- The benefit of combining smell and sight decreases between four and twelve months.
- Early multisensory experiences contribute to the development of perception and later cognitive skills.
A collaborative study published in Child Development and conducted by teams at the Université de Bourgogne, University of Hamburg, Université de Lyon, Institut Universitaire de France, Université de Lorraine, Centre Hospitalier de Nancy, and the CNRS examined how French infants between four and twelve months use their mother’s scent when perceiving faces.
Using EEG to measure face-selective brain responses, the researchers tracked developmental changes in neural markers of face perception and tested whether the presence of a mother’s body odor modulated those responses. The study confirms that face-processing responses increase and become more complex over this age range, while the enhancing effect of maternal odor steadily declines as visual perception matures.
The team tested 50 infants aged four to twelve months and found a clear pattern: at four months, infants showed stronger face-selective neural responses when their mother’s scent was present; by twelve months, infants’ visual systems had developed to the point that the odor provided little additional benefit. This inverse relationship highlights how developing sensory systems shift reliance among modalities as experience and neural maturation progress.
These findings add to a growing body of research indicating that multisensory integration supports early perception when one modality is still immature. In human infants, olfaction is relatively functional very early, whereas vision develops more slowly; maternal odor thus appears to scaffold early visual learning, particularly for socially relevant stimuli like faces.
Interview highlights with Dr. Arnaud Leleu, Université de Bourgogne
Why study smell and multisensory perception in infants?
Dr. Leleu explains that perception is fundamentally a multisensory process built from past experience with concurrent sensory inputs. While most multisensory research focuses on sight and hearing, olfaction has been underestimated despite being highly functional in newborns. His research aims to clarify how early olfactory signals shape the development of visual perception.
What did the study do and find?
The team measured EEG face-selective responses in infants while exposing them either to their mother’s natural body odor or to a neutral condition. They observed that face-related neural activity grows and becomes more complex between four and twelve months. Simultaneously, the facilitative effect of maternal odor is strongest in the youngest infants and weakens with age, demonstrating that vision increasingly supports face recognition independently as infants mature.
Practical implications for caregivers
Dr. Leleu emphasizes that repeated exposure to consistent sensory pairings supports perceptual learning and later cognitive abilities such as memory, language, and conceptual understanding. Caregivers can support development by providing rich multisensory experiences—showing the shape and color of an object, letting infants touch it, hear sounds it makes, and smell it—to reinforce associations across senses.
Surprising findings and future directions
One striking result is how powerfully maternal odor affects infants’ responses to unfamiliar faces, suggesting the mother’s scent has a reassuring, prosocial effect. Future research questions include whether similar odor effects apply to non-social stimuli, how new olfactory-visual associations develop as infants become more mobile, and whether odors evoke early memory traces comparable to adults’ odor-evoked memories.
Funding: This research received support from French and European funding sources, including the Investissements d’Avenir Program (ISITE-BFC), the Conseil Régional Bourgogne Franche-Comté, FEDER, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, the European Research Council, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
About this olfaction and neurodevelopment research news
Author: Jessica Efstathiou
Source: Society for Research in Child Development
Contact: Jessica Efstathiou – Society for Research in Child Development
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Findings published in Child Development.