Affective matching of odors and facial expressions in infants: shifting patterns between 3 and 7 months
2016
Godard, Ornella | Baudouin, Jean-Yves | Schaal, Benoist | Durand, Karine | Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l'Alimentation [Dijon] (CSGA) ; Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Université de Bourgogne (UB)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) | Vision Action Cognition (VAC - EA 7326) ; Université Paris Descartes - Paris 5 (UPD5) | Institut universitaire de France (IUF) ; Ministère de l'Education nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche (M.E.N.E.S.R.) | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris ; French National Agency for Research (project INTERFACE, EMCO), Paris ; Regional Council of Burgundy (PARI grant), Dijon ; European Community (FABER grant), Brussels ; Institut Universitaire de France, Paris.
Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior. Past research suggests that at 5 to 7months of age, infants look longer to an unfamiliar dynamic angry/happy face which emotionally matches a vocal expression. This suggests that they can match stimulations of distinct modalities on their emotional content. In the present study, olfaction-vision matching abilities were assessed across different age groups (3, 5 and 7months) using dynamic expressive faces (happy vs. disgusted) and distinct hedonic odor contexts (pleasant, unpleasant and control) in a visual-preference paradigm. At all ages the infants were biased toward the disgust faces. This visual bias reversed into a bias for smiling faces in the context of the pleasant odor context in the 3-month-old infants. In infants aged 5 and 7months, no effect of the odor context appeared in the present conditions. This study highlights the role of the olfactory context in the modulation of visual behavior toward expressive faces in infants. The influence of olfaction took the form of a contingency effect in 3-month-old infants, but later evolved to vanish or to take another form that could not be evidenced in the present study.
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