Benoist Schaal

TL;DR: This study provides the first clear evidence that through their diet human mothers influence the hedonic polarity of their neonates' initial olfactory responses and has potential implications for the early mother-to-infant transmission of chemosensory information relative to food and addictive products.

TL;DR: The nature of an odour signal emitted by the female rabbit to which newborn pups respond by attraction and oral grasping is focused on, and a complete chemical and behavioural description of a pheromone of mammary origin in a mammalian species is provided.

TL;DR: This review compares three well-studied species (the rabbit, pig and sheep) that differ in their parental strategies and in the problems that neonates have to overcome.

TL;DR: No convincing evidence was obtained that neonates discriminated the hedonic valence of odors within the same perceptual space as adults, but neonates evinced a differential pattern of respiratory responding to the presentation of milk odors according to the mode of feeding, suggesting that early olfactory discrimination may be mediated by stimuli with high ecological salience.

TL;DR: Characterizing the level of specificity of the human newborn's response to an odor experienced in utero is consistent with the hypothesis that the human fetus can detect and store the unique chemosensory information available in the prenatal environment and that this information becomes coupled with positive control of behavior.