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Newborn Infants' Preference for Attractive Faces: The Role of Internal and External Facial Features

Alan Slater1, Gavin Bremner2, Scott P Johnson3

  • 1School of Psychology University of Exeter.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies
|July 19, 2020
PubMed

Insights

Newborn infants prefer attractive faces by focusing on internal features like eyes and nose. This "attractiveness effect" shows early visual processing of facial attractiveness in infants.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Infant Perception
  • Visual Neuroscience

Background:

  • Previous studies indicate infants prefer attractive faces over unattractive ones.
  • The specific facial features (internal vs. external) driving this preference remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether newborn infants' "attractiveness effect" relies on internal or external facial features.
  • To determine if infants attend to both internal and external facial information.

Main Methods:

  • Newborn infants (mean age 2 days, 9 hours) were presented with pairs of attractive and unattractive faces.
  • Experimental conditions manipulated identical internal features with different external features, and vice versa.
  • Infants' looking time towards attractive vs. unattractive faces was recorded.

Main Results:

  • Infants looked longer at attractive faces when external features were identical, but not when internal features were identical.
  • This suggests newborns utilize internal facial information for attractiveness judgments.

Conclusions:

  • Newborn infants demonstrate preferences for attractiveness based on internal facial features.
  • Infants are capable of attending to both internal and external facial features in visual stimuli.

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