During infancy, intersensory facilitation declines gradually as unisensory perception develops. However, this trade-off was mainly investigated using audiovisual stimulations. Here, fifty 4- to 12-month-old infants (26 females, predominately White) were tested in 2017–2020 to determine whether the facilitating effect of their mother's body odor on neural face categorization, as previously observed at 4 months, decreases with age. In a baseline odor context, the results revealed a face-selective electroencephalographic response that increases and changes qualitatively between 4 and 12 months, marking improved face categorization. At the same time, the benefit of adding maternal odor fades with age (R ² = .31), indicating an inverse relation with the amplitude of the visual response, and generalizing to olfactory-visual interactions previous evidence from the audiovisual domain.

中文翻译：

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婴儿大脑的嗅觉到视觉易化性从 4 到 12 个月逐渐下降


在婴儿期，随着单感官知觉的发展，感觉间易化性逐渐下降。然而，这种权衡主要是使用视听刺激来研究的。在这里，对 50 名 4 至 12 个月大的婴儿（26 名女性，主要是白人）在 2017-2020 年进行了测试，以确定他们母亲的体味对神经面部分类的促进作用，如之前在 4 个月时观察到的那样，是否随着年龄的增长而降低。在基线气味背景下，结果显示面部选择性脑电图反应在 4 到 12 个月之间增加和发生质的变化，标志着面部分类的改善。同时，添加母体气味的好处随着年龄的增长而消失 （R² = .31），表明与视觉反应的幅度成反比，并将来自视听领域的先前证据推广到嗅觉-视觉交互。