Human awareness and uses of odor cues in everyday life: Results from a questionnaire study in children

Abstract

The Children's Olfactory Behavior in Everyday Life questionnaire was developed to assess attention to, and uses of, odors in real-life situations, and to evaluate individual variations. The tool comprises 16 items prompting self-reports of active seeking, awareness and affective reactivity to odors of food, people and the environment. Children (102 girls, 113 boys) aged 6–10 years participated in the study. The results revealed that girls were significantly more olfaction-oriented than boys, especially towards the odors of people, self and the environment. An increasing ability of children to describe the odor facets of their perceptual world was found between 6 and 10 years, partly due to ameliorating verbal skills. Finally, owning an “attachment object” was linked to olfactory reactivity to odors, especially in social and affective contexts. Overall, this research contributes to expand our understanding of the behavioral importance of odors in children and its individual variations, and it brings additional arguments against the prevalent concept of functional microsmaty applied to the human species.