Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, says a UK researcher, suggesting that face recognition is hardwired at birth, rather than learned.

Alan Slater and his colleagues at the University of Exeter showed paired images of faces to babies as young a one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face.

“Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s innate to a newborn infant,” says Slater.

Developmental psychologists have known for years that babies have preferences for certain objects, such as high contrast images, and curvy, biological shapes. But where these preferences come from remained unknown.


Slater’s research, using extraordinarily young infants, supports the idea that babies are not mere blank slates, but instead come into the world with a fairly well developed perception system.

Pretty people

The group took pictures of a variety of female faces and asked adult subjects presented to rate them for attractiveness. Subjects scored each face on a scale from 1 to 5. The researchers then searched for pairs of photographs that were similar in all respects – in brightness and contrast, for example – but at opposite ends of the attractiveness scale.

They then presented these paired photographs to newborn infants, who ranged in age from one to seven days old. All babies were in the still in hospital after birth. One researcher held each infant upright about 30 centimetres away from the two photos. Another stood out of view and noted where the babies eyes were directed.

Almost all the babies spent more time looking at the more attractive face than the less attractive one, says Slater, who will be presenting his results at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival of Science in Exeter later this week.

He suggests the reason for this preference is simple – pretty people actually have the prototype of a human face. Researchers have long noted that by melding together hundreds of faces, a statistical average of facial characteristics is reached that happens to be incredibly attractive.

In a baby’s mind, these beautiful faces may represent the stereotypical human face, says Slater, which they have evolved to recognise. Such built-in information helps babies learn quickly including the ability to pair faces with sounds like voices.

According to Slater: “Babies are born with a fairly detailed representation of the average human face that helps them recognise familiar faces and also helps them learn about the social world.”