This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Babies smell wonderful—at least to their parents. An international research team of Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska investigated why teenagers lose this special olfactory advantage and has now been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for the research.
"Science is about curiosity, the joy of experimentation and, at its best, a certain degree of craziness. That is precisely what this prize celebrates—the fun of doing research. So we were genuinely delighted to receive the Ig Nobel Prize," says Ilona Croy, professor of clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
The name "Ig Nobel" is a play on "Nobel" and the English word "ignoble," and the awards can be regarded as the playful counterpart to the Nobel Prizes. Each year, the Annals of Improbable Research awards 10 prizes to surprising scientific studies that "first make people laugh, then make them think." This principle certainly applies to the team's research. It began with a simple question: Why do babies smell so pleasant to their parents—and what happens to this smell during puberty?
For the initial study, published in 2017, 255 mothers and fathers were asked to rate their child's body odor. For comparison, they also rated the body odor of their partner. The results showed that the vast majority of parents found the body odor of babies and young children particularly pleasant—even more pleasant than that of their partner.
As the children grew older, however, this particular olfactory preference decreased markedly. This was independent of how positively parents rated their relationship with their child. The questionnaire study became the starting point for a series of further experiments.
Croy and her colleagues collected body odor samples from more than 300 children of different ages and presented them to parents and nonparents. Some of the experiments were conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results extend the "Kindchenschema," which was first described 80 years ago in relation to the visual features of young children: Babies and young children not only look cute, they also smell adorable.
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