Developmental Ethology and Cognitive Psychology Group, Center for Smell, Taste and Food Science, Dijon, France.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 28;8(8):e70677. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0070677. eCollection 2013.
This study investigated whether an odor can affect infants' attention to visually presented objects and whether it can selectively direct visual gaze at visual targets as a function of their meaning. Four-month-old infants (n = 48) were exposed to their mother's body odors while their visual exploration was recorded with an eye-movement tracking system. Two groups of infants, who were assigned to either an odor condition or a control condition, looked at a scene composed of still pictures of faces and cars. As expected, infants looked longer at the faces than at the cars but this spontaneous preference for faces was significantly enhanced in presence of the odor. As expected also, when looking at the face, the infants looked longer at the eyes than at any other facial regions, but, again, they looked at the eyes significantly longer in the presence of the odor. Thus, 4-month-old infants are sensitive to the contextual effects of odors while looking at faces. This suggests that early social attention to faces is mediated by visual as well as non-visual cues.
本研究旨在探究气味是否能影响婴儿对视觉呈现物体的注意力，以及其是否能根据物体的意义选择性地引导视觉注视点。研究招募了 48 名四个月大的婴儿（n=48），在他们观看视觉场景的同时记录他们的眼动轨迹。这些婴儿被随机分配到气味组或对照组，他们观看的场景由静止的人脸和汽车图片组成。正如预期的那样，与汽车相比，婴儿会注视人脸更长时间，但在闻到气味时，这种对人脸的自发偏好明显增强。同样，当婴儿观察人脸时，他们会注视眼睛更长时间，但在闻到气味时，他们注视眼睛的时间明显更长。因此，四个月大的婴儿在观察人脸时对气味的环境影响很敏感。这表明，婴儿对面部的早期社会关注是由视觉和非视觉线索共同介导的。
