Laura Shanahan, assistant professor of psychology and a member of the neuroscience program at Rhodes College, along with other researchers, has published an article in The Journal of Neuroscience titled "Characterizing Olfactory Brain Responses In Young Infants."
The sense of smell facilitates several adaptive behaviors in infants such as feeding and soothing, but the brain areas supporting infant ability to perceive smells are understudied.
According to the researchers: “Here, we delivered appetitive and aversive odors to sleeping infants during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We show that odors evoke activity in olfactory brain regions and thalamus already at one month of age, and activity levels vary across odors in some of these regions (e.g., piriform cortex, amygdala). However, we did not find strong evidence for pattern-based odor information in the same brain areas. Finally, preliminary nasal airflow findings suggest that infants inhale more vigorously in response to appetitive compared to aversive odors. Taken together, these findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms of infant olfaction.”