Research Article Short-Term Effects of Pacifier Texture on NNS in Neurotypical Infants

Copyright © 2013 Austin L. Oder et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The dense representation of trigeminal mechanosensitive afferents in the lip vermilion, anterior tongue, intraoral mucosa, and temporomandibular joint allows the infant’s orofacial system to encode a wide range of somatosensory experiences during the critical period associated with feed development. Our understanding of how this complex sensorium processes texture is very limited in adults, and the putative role of texture encoding in the infant is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the short-term effects of a novel textured pacifier experience in healthy term infants