September 11, 2004
-
Day-old babies have eyes for a pretty face
By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 06/09/2004)
Beauty does not lie in the eye of the beholder - it is hardwired into the brains of babies long before birth, according to research.
Scientists have shown that babies as young as one day old prefer to gaze at photographs of pretty faces than ugly ones.
The discovery suggests that people are born with a innate sense of what features are attractive, and challenges the idea that notions of beauty are culturally determined.
Dr Alan Slater, a psychologist, and colleagues at Exeter University carried out the experiments on 100 babies in the first few days after birth.
He showed the infants pairs of photographs of faces that had already been rated on an attractiveness scale of one to 10 by adults. A hidden observer recorded how long the babies spent looking at the images.
The babies, whose ages ranged from a day to a week old, consistently spent longer gazing at the faces judged to be attractive.
"Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, but it is in the brain of the newborn right from birth and possibly before,"' said Dr Slater. Dr Slater believes that the reason for the babies' preferences lies in the link between attractive faces and "typical" faces.
"If you take an average of faces, the result is an extremely attractive individual," said Dr Slater.
"Evolution has built into the developing visual system of babies some innate representation of the typical face which correspondents to an attractive face. The preference in babies for an attractive face is because it most closely resembles the prototype that teaches them what a face is in the first place."
Comments (3)
They don't call it "classic beauty" for nothing...
Actually, you have more active brain cells while you are in the womb; than you do after you are born. The very act of being born causes us to lose more brain cells then anything we do in our entire lifetime. Unless of course you get some sort of brain damage later on in life. We are at our highest ability to learn; and probably the smartest we will ever have the opportunity to be while we are in utero.
I think I read this in a psychology textbook a l-o-n-g time ago.
Comments are closed.