A recent study seems to indicate that Newborns have a similar facial aesthetic to adults.
Babies are born with an eye for beauty. Infants only hours old will choose to stare at an attractive face rather than an unattractive one – and they also prefer to listen to Vivaldi straight, rather than Vivaldi backwards.
According to Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at the University of Exeter, humans may have a biologically ingrained preference for beauty.
As defined, at least.
He will tell the British Association science festival, which opens in Exeter today, that he presented a photographic choice to almost 100 newborns, on average only 2.5 days old.
The two sets of faces were composites created by computers from a number of volunteers’ faces. They followed the now widely observed psychological consensus that faces with features that are close to the human average in size and shape are generally perceived to be attractive.
It has been noted in the past that, shown two faces, babies a few months old will spend more time looking at the attractive face; and it has also been suggested that humans build up their concept of attractiveness based on an “average” of all the faces they see.
“But we get exactly the same effect with newborn infants,” said Dr Slater – “which is to say that newborn infants will look at the more attractive of two faces.”
[…] “It used to be thought that new-born babies came into the world as a totally blank sheet of paper on which experience will then write,” he said yesterday. “But what we are finding more and more is that babies are born with a number of in-built mechanisms that help them to organise and make sense of their newly-perceived world – and one of these is that they display an attractiveness effect.”
Reading this, I don’t know that it’s as clear-cut as, say, some do. It means that babies have some sort of ability to latch onto caregivers based on appearance (though even that may be very quick to develop, for survival’s sake, even in just a few days), and while the sample set might be small, identifying an “attractive” average would certainly be possible.
I also worry a scosh about conflating the concept of an “average” of faces to being “attractive” (attracting attention) and thus to being “beautiful,” given the connotations thereof.
Still, an interesting study.
(via Cronaca)