Odor discrimination in children aged 4-12 years

Publikation: Beitrag in FachzeitschriftForschungsartikelBeigetragenBegutachtung

Beitragende

Abstract

Olfaction is functional at birth and newborns use their sense of smell to navigate their environment. Yet, certain chemosensory abilities are subject to experience and develop with age. It has been argued that odor discrimination is a key ability enabling organisms to capture and distinguish odors occurring in the environment to further identify them and formulate a behavioral response. Yet, the development of odor discrimination abilities has been overlooked in the literature, with few attempts to investigate developmental changes in odor discrimination abilities independent of verbal abilities and olfactory experience. Here, building on these attempts, we propose a novel approach to studying the development of odor discrimination abilities by utilizing odor enantiomers - pairs of odorous molecules of identical chemical and physical features, but differing in optical activity. We hypothesized that discrimination of enantiomeric odor pairs in children and adolescents would be less prone to age effects than discrimination of pairs of common odors due to their encoding difficulty and their limited exposure in common olfactory experience. We examined olfactory discrimination abilities in children aged 4-12 years with regard to three common odor pairs and five enantiomeric odor pairs. The study protocol eliminated verbal and cognitive development bias, resulting in diminished age advantage of the older children in discrimination of enantiomers as compared to common odors.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummerbjac005
FachzeitschriftChemical senses
Jahrgang47
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 15 Apr. 2022
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Externe IDs

Scopus 85130154436
Mendeley 5a97b65e-6b51-3b5b-bd45-8e944b04680f
ORCID /0000-0001-9713-0183/work/146645228

Schlagworte

Schlagwörter

  • Adolescent, Child, Humans, Infant, Newborn, Odorants, Smell/physiology, development, developmental psychology, olfaction, olfactory experience, odor discrimination

Bibliotheksschlagworte