Projects

In different projects, we research the social and emotional development in infants.

What influence does the mother's odor have on social perception?

From birth, parents play an important role in a child’s development. They not only provide fresh diapers and food, but also offer the child security, comfort, and trust—essential foundations for discovering the world around them. In this project, we examine the role a mother’s scent plays in this context. For example, can the mere scent of the mother have a calming effect on young babies? And how does this, in turn, influence the way babies perceive other people? We explore these questions primarily in infants between six and seven months of age.

First results from this project are available here:

Jessen, S. (2020). Maternal odor reduces the neural response to fearful faces in human infants. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 45, 100858.

Düfeld, A.*, Nehler, R.*, Peplies, E., Jessen, S. Social odor as a source of learning in human infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.04.010.

Do infants infer character traits from faces?

When adults see another person for the first time, they usually form (at least a preliminary) opinion of that person quite quickly—for example, judging them as more or less trustworthy. Recent studies show that similar judgments can already be observed in young children. We are now investigating whether such judgments can also be observed in infants. In addition, we are interested in how infants arrive at these judgments and what mechanisms might underlie them.

Publications from this project:

Jessen, S. & Grossmann, T. (2019). Neural evidence for the impact of facial trustworthiness on object processing in a gaze-cueing task in 7-month-old infants. Social Neuroscience.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2019.1651764

Jessen, S. & Grossmann, T. (2019). Neural evidence for the subliminal processing of facial trustworthiness in infancy. Neuropsychologia, 126, 46-53.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.025 (pdf)

Jessen,S. & Grossmann, T. (2016).  Neural and behavioral evidence for infants’ sensitivity to the trustworthiness of faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 28(11), 1728-1736.
https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00999 (pdf)