The Hindu : International : An early eye for beauty

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 07, 2004

International

International

An early eye for beauty

By Tim Radford

LONDON, SEPT. 6. 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.

According to Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at the University of Exeter in England, humans may have a biologically ingrained preference for beauty. 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 faces. They followed psychological consensus that faces with features that are close to the human average in size and shape are 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 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.'' His subjects were held upright, looking at photographs or other imagery, while being watched by psychologists. ``Visual acuity, the ability to detect fine detail, is not perfect, but it is not too bad and the baby begins making sense of the visual world right from the word go. You can show pair after pair after pair of faces where they are matched for everything apart from attractiveness, and the infants will look at the more attractive one — leading to the conclusion that babies are born with a fairly detailed representation of the human face that allows them to detect and recognise faces.''

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