Preference for attractive faces in human infants extends beyond conspecifics.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Comparative Cognition
• Evolutionary Psychology

Background:

• Human infants exhibit an early preference for attractive human faces.
• The specificity of this preference (human-specific vs. general) remains an open question.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether infant preference for attractive faces is limited to human faces.
• To explore the underlying mechanisms driving infant face attractiveness preferences.

Main Methods:

• Presenting 3- to 4-month-old infants with attractive and unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces.
• Utilizing inverted faces to control for low-level image differences.
• Assessing the influence of attractiveness preference on recognition memory.

Main Results:

• Infants showed a preference for attractive over unattractive cat faces.
• This preference was absent for inverted faces, ruling out low-level image artifacts.
• Attractiveness preference impacted subsequent face recognition memory.

Conclusions:

• Infant preference for attractive faces is not human-specific.
• General perceptual mechanisms, rather than mate choice adaptations, likely underlie these preferences.
• Early-developing face processing mechanisms may be broadly tuned.