Babies and Sensory experiences

Ustun and colleagues’ research boosts our understanding of human sensory systems (and confirms that kale is vile).  They report that “The diet of pregnant women exposes fetuses to a variety of flavours consisting of compound sensations involving smell, taste, and chemesthesis. The effects of such prenatal flavor exposure on chemosensory development have so far been measured only postnatally in human infants. Here, we report the first direct evidence of human fetal responsiveness to flavors transferred via maternal consumption of a single-dose capsule by measuring frame-by-frame fetal facial movements. . . . Fetuses exposed to carrot flavor . . . showed ‘lip-corner puller’ and ‘laughter-face gestalt’ more frequently, whereas fetuses exposed to kale flavor . . . showed more ‘upper-lip raiser,’ ‘lower-lip depressor,’ ‘lip stretch,’ ‘lip presser,’ and ‘cry-face gestalt’ in comparison with the carrot group and a control group not exposed to any flavors. . . . Findings of this study have important implications for understanding the earliest evidence for fetal abilities to sense and discriminate different flavors.”

Beyza Ustun, Nadja Reissland, Judith Covey, Benoist Schaal, and Jacqueline Blissett. “Flavor Sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviors in the Human Fetus.”  Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221105460