Mothers are attracted by infant cues of a variety of different modalities. To clarify the possible neural mechanisms underlying maternal attraction to infant odor cues, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during odor detection tasks in which 19 mothers and 19 nulliparous females (nonmothers) were presented with infant or adult male odors. They were ins...

Evaluative conditioning is a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which the “CR” is a change in preference or liking for the “CS.” It is probably a major cause of development of likes and dislikes in humans. This research introduces a new, cross-modal evaluative conditioning procedure using odors as USs and photographs of people’s faces as CSs. When liked, neutral, and disliked odors that were pla...

This paper provides evidence of substantial individual differences in the affective importance of odors, and offers initial validation for an eight-item scale of the impact of odor (AIO) on liking for people, places, foods and cosmetic/health products. In study 1, 116 American college students and 336 Flemish Belgian college students completed the AIO along with other measures of reactions to o...

Visual and auditory stimuli of high social and ecological importance are processed in the brain by specialized neuronal networks. To date, this has not been demonstrated for olfactory stimuli. By means of positron emission tomography, we sought to elucidate the neuronal substrates behind body odor perception to answer the question of whether the central processing of body odors differs from per...

In nature, animals normally perceive sensory information on top of backgrounds. Thus, the neural substrate to perceive under background conditions is inherent in all sensory systems. Where and how sensory systems process backgrounds is not fully understood. In olfaction, just a few studies have addressed the issue of odor coding on top of continuous odorous backgrounds. Here, we tested how back...