Studying the effects of smell and taste experience in the pediatric population using functional near infrared spectroscopy: A hypothesis

There are different postnatal sensitive periods throughout the development course of sensory functions. During sensitive periods, there is a biological display of an extreme neural sensitivity to the storage of experience-driven sensory information that is not present outside these developmental stages. This neural property is reflected in subjects’ reported preferences for sensory stimuli, such as odors and tastes. The human brain mapping approach (HBA) has demonstrated that disease-free human postnatal and later development of any sensory function parallels morphological and functional development of the CNS and that this development correlates with signal changes that have been acquired by means of neuroimaging techniques. Whether experience with tastes and/or odors has a stronger effect on the perception of gustatory and/or olfactory stimuli the earlier subjects are exposed to certain odors and tastes is still unknown. It is also unknown, whether as well as how this effect is reflected in brain activation patterns and whether we are currently able to identify sensitive periods of gustatory and olfactory development from the imaging signals. To answer these research questions, repeated exposure to tastes and/or odors should be applied in children of different age ranges in order to induce different age-related degrees of olfactory/gustatory preferences as well as different aged-related patterns of oxyhemoglobin (OH) and deoxyhemoglobin (DOH) changes that should be measured by means of the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique.