Fabrice Damon

Scientist
Pierre-Yves Musso

General information

Assistant Professor

DOCC – Development of Olfactory Communication and Cognition

fabrice.damon@u-bourgogne.fr
 https://cv.hal.science/fabrice-damon

Job

Associate Professor, Université Bourgogne Europe


2015:        Ph.D. Thesis in Cognitive Psychology, CNRS – Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (LPNC), University Grenoble-Alpes. Advisors: Olivier PASCALIS and David MEARY. Subject: Development of familiarity preferences in infancy.
2012:        M.A. in Cognitive Psychology, CNRS – LPNC, University Grenoble-Alpes.
2010:        B.A. in Psychology, University Grenoble-Alpes.

Activities

Research theme
I study the processes of “olfactory cognition in social cognition”, or how olfaction influences social perception, and in particular the perception of faces. Along with Karine Durand and Arnaud Leleu, I run the CSGA's “P'tit Labo”. There, we welcome infants between 3 and 24 months (and their parents!) to carry out studies on cognitive development, particularly the influence of olfaction on social development, using behavioural methods (e.g., eye-tracking, video coding) and electrophysiological (e.g., EEG) measurements. We are also working with the maternity ward of the Dijon University Hospital, where we are studying olfactory communication between few-day-old infants and their parents. In collaboration with teams of ethologists and chemists, I am also working on the perception of emotional odours in human adults and infants, as well as in animals (e.g. horses and sheep). At the same time, I teach methodology, epistemology and statistics to psychology students at the University of Burgundy.
Scientific approach
Behavior,
Supervision
I supervised numerous students (licence, Master), along with several PhD students and posdoc. I currently supervise two PhD students.
Aknowledgements
  • 2023:
Key words
Psychology,  olfaction, vision, face perception, infant cognitive development, body odors, eye-tracking, psychophysics

Important publications

Klaey‐Tassone, M., Soussignan, R., Durand, K., Roy, S. L., Damon, F., Villière, A., ... & Schaal, B. (2024). Testing detectability, attractivity, hedonic specificity, extractability, and robustness of colostrum odor—Toward an olfactory bioassay for human neonates. Developmental Psychobiology, 66(3), e22474.

Jardat, P., Destrez, A., Damon, F., Menard--Peroy, Z., Parias, C., Barrière, P., ... & Lansade, L. (2023). Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 3285.

Damon, F., Quinn, P. C., Méary, D., & Pascalis, O. (2022). Asymmetrical responding to male versus female other-race categories in 9- to 12-month-old infants. British Journal of Psychology, 00, 1– 23. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12582

Damon, F., Mezrai, N., Magnier, L., Leleu, A., Durand, K., & Schaal, B. (2021) Olfaction in the multisensory processing of faces: A narrative review of the influence of human body odors. Frontiers in Psychology. 12:750944. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750944

Damon, F., Quinn, P. C., & Pascalis, O. (2021). When novelty prevails on familiarity: Visual biases for child versus infant faces in 3.5- to 12-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 210, 105174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105174

Rekow, D., Baudouin, J.Y., Poncet, F., Damon, F., Durand, K., Schaal, B., Rossion, B., & Leleu, A. (2021). Smells like real faces: Odor-driven pareidolia in the infant brain. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. 118(21). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014979118

Klaey-Tassone, M., Durand, K., Damon, F., Heyers, K., Mezrai, N., Patris, B., Sagot, P., Soussignan, R., Schaal, B. & the MILKODOR Consortium. (2020). Human neonates prefer colostrum to mature milk: Evidence for an olfactory bias towards the ‘initial milk’? American Journal of Human Biology, e23521. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23521

Damon, F., Leleu, A., Rekow, D., Poncet, F., & Baudouin, J.Y. (2020). Expertise for conspecific face individuation in the human brain. NeuroImage, 208, 116218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116218

Damon, F., Mottier, H., Méary, D., & Pascalis, O. (2017). A review of attractiveness preferences in infancy: From faces to objects. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. 3:321–336. doi : 10.1007/s40750-017-0071-2.

Damon, F., Méary, D., Quinn, P. C., Lee, K., Simpson, E. A., Paukner, A., Suomi S. J., & Pascalis, O. (2017). Preference for facial averageness: Evidence for a common mechanism in human and macaque infants. Scientific Reports, 7, 46303. doi: 10.1038/srep46303.

 

DOCC – Development of Olfactory Communication and Cognition