Newborn infants prefer attractive faces

Several previous experiments have found that infants 2 months of age and older will spend more time looking at attractive faces when these are shown paired with faces judged by adults to be unattractive. Two experiments are described whose aim was to find whether the "attractiveness effect" is present soon after birth. In both, pairings of attractive and unattractive female faces (as judged by adult raters) were shown to newborn infants (in the age range 14-151 hours from birth), and in both the infants looked longer at the attractive faces. These findings can be interpreted either in terms of an innate perceptual mechanism that detects and responds specifically to faces, or in terms of rapid learning about faces soon after birth.