ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Odor-driven face-like categorization in the human infant brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Rhythmic visual stimulation as a window into early brain development: A systematic review.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Is human face recognition lateralized to the right hemisphere due to neural competition with left-lateralized visual word recognition? A critical review.Brain structure & function · 2022Pooled it
- Cross-modal impacts of olfactory perception and individual differences in emotional responses to odors modulate hedonic evaluations of visual scenes.Chemical senses · 2026Article
- Article
- Emergence of Neural Face Selectivity in Infants Younger Than 4 Months Old.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2026Article
- The neural basis of face pareidolia with human intracerebral recordings.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Article
- Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Visual periodicity reveals distinct attentional signatures for face and non-face categories.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- A behavioral advantage for the face pareidolia illusion in peripheral vision.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Infant neuroscience: how to measure brain activity in the youngest minds.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Dynamic brain communication underwriting face pareidolia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Review
- Preliminary evidence of an increased susceptibility to face pareidolia in postpartum women.Biology letters · 2023Article
- What determines the neural response to snakes in the infant brain? A systematic comparison of color and grayscale stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The power of rhythms: how steady-state evoked responses reveal early neurocognitive development.NeuroImage · 2022Article
- Sniffing out smell's effects on human behaviour.Nature · 2022Article
- Affective regulation through touch: homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2022Article
- A neural marker of rapid discrimination of facial expression in 3.5- and 7-month-old infants.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Frequency tagging with infants: The visual oddball paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how the young infant brain starts to categorize the flurry of ambiguous sensory inputs coming in from its complex environment is of primary scientific interest. Here, we test the hypothesis that senses other than vision play a key role in initiating complex visual categorizations in 20 4-mo-old infants exposed either to a baseline odor or to their mother's odor while their electroencephalogram (EEG) is recorded. Various natural images of objects are presented at a 6-Hz rate (six images/second), with face-like object configurations of the same object categories (i.e., eliciting face pareidolia in adults) interleaved every sixth stimulus (i.e., 1 Hz). In the baseline odor context, a weak neural categorization response to face-like stimuli appears at 1 Hz in the EEG frequency spectrum over bilateral occipitotemporal regions. Critically, this face-like-selective response is magnified and becomes right lateralized in the presence of maternal body odor. This reveals that nonvisual cues systematically associated with human faces in the infant's experience shape the interpretation of face-like configurations as faces in the right hemisphere, dominant for face categorization. At the individual level, this intersensory influence is particularly effective when there is no trace of face-like categorization in the baseline odor context. These observations provide evidence for the early tuning of face-(like)-selective activity from multisensory inputs in the developing brain, suggesting that perceptual development integrates information across the senses for efficient category acquisition, with early maturing systems such as olfaction driving the acquisition of categories in later-developing systems such as vision.
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