How do human newborns come to understand the multimodal environment?

Stréri, Arlette; Hevia, Maria Dolores de

doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02260-y

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Human infants are exposed to a complex multisensory environment from the very beginning of life. The early ability to form multisensory percepts has long been debated (e.g., Gibson, 1969; Piaget, 1952), but evidence that infants’ sensory systems interact is nowadays clear (Bahrick and Lickliter, 2012; Lewkowicz and Bremner, 2020; Murray et al, 2016; Streri and de Hevia, 2023, for reviews). Newborns already possess the brain architecture to integrate inputs across sensory modalities (Sours et al, 2017) and have incipient skills to respond to correlated multisensory cues, relying on intensity (Lewkowicz and Turkewitz, 1980) or temporal occurrence (Lewkowicz et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Olfactory facilitation of visual categorization in the 4-month-old brain depends on visual demand

Kiseleva,

Rekow,

Schaal

et al. 2024

Preprint

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To navigate their environment, infants rely on intersensory facilitation when unisensory perceptual demand is high, a principle known as inverse effectiveness. Given that this principle was mainly documented in the context of audiovisual stimulations, here we aim to determine whether it applies to olfactory-to-visual facilitation. We build on previous evidence that the mother’s body odor facilitates face categorization in the 4-month-old brain, and investigate whether this effect depends on visual demand. Scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded in 2 groups of 4-month-old infants while they watched 6-Hz streams of visual stimuli with faces displayed every 6thstimulus to tag a face-selective response at 1 Hz. We used variable natural stimuli in one group (NatGroup), while stimuli were simplified in the other group (SimpGroup) to reduce perceptual categorization demand. During visual stimulation, infants were alternatively exposed to their mother’svs. a baseline odor. For both groups, we found an occipito-temporal face-selective response, but with a larger amplitude for the simplified stimuli, reflecting less demanding visual categorization. Importantly, the mother’s body odor enhances the response to natural, but not to simplified, face stimuli, indicating that maternal odor improves face categorization when it is most demanding for the 4-month-old brain. Overall, this study demonstrates that the inverse effectiveness of intersensory facilitation applies to the sense of smell during early perceptual development.Highlights- Intersensory facilitation is a function of unisensory perceptual demand in infants (inverse effectiveness).- This inverse relation between multisensory and unisensory perception has been mainly documented using audiovisual stimulations.- Here we show that olfactory-to-visual facilitation depends on visual demand in 4-month-old infants.- The inverse effectiveness of intersensory facilitation during early perceptual development applies to the sense of smell.

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