Abstract
Odor perception plays a critical role in early human development, but the underlying neural mechanisms are not fully understood. To investigate these, we presented appetitive and aversive odors to infants of both sexes at 1 month of age while recording functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and nasal airflow data. Infants slept during odor presentation to allow MRI scanning. We found that odors evoke robust fMRI activity in the bilateral olfactory cortex and thalamus and that fMRI response magnitudes in the olfactory cortex differ across odors. However, in contrast to prior work in adults, we did not find compelling evidence that odor stimuli evoke discriminable fMRI activity patterns in the olfactory cortex or thalamus using two different multivariate pattern analysis techniques. Finally, the average inhale airflow rate was higher for appetitive odors than aversive odors, which tentatively suggests that infants could modulate their respiration to reflect odor valence. Overall, these results show strong neural responses to odors at this early developmental stage and highlight nasal airflow as a behavioral metric for assessing odor preference in infants.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e1780242025 |
| Journal | Journal of Neuroscience |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 12 2025 |
Funding
We thank Todd Parrish and Yufen Jennie Chen for their assistance with the MRI protocol, as well as Sumehda Attanti and Rachael Young for their assistance with data collection. We also acknowledge Sebastian Otero for his assistance with participant recruitment and logistics and Sheila Krogh-Jespersen for her input on infant sleep MRI. This research was funded by grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (T32HL007909 to L.K.S.) and the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (R01DC015426 to T.K.), as well as the Rhodes College Faculty Development Endowment Grant (to L.K.S.), the Visionary Grant from Stanley Manne Children\u2019s Research Institute and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children\u2019s Hospital of Chicago (to L.B.M.), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program (ZIA DA000642 to T.K.). The opinions expressed in this work are the authors\u2019 own and do not reflect the view of the National Institutes of Health/Department of Health and Human Services.
Keywords
- decoding
- fMRI
- infants
- olfaction
- respiration
- valence
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Neuroscience