NEWBORN-INFANTS PREFER ATTRACTIVE FACES

Several previous experiments have found that infants 2 months of age a nd older will spend more time looking at attractive faces when these a re shown paired with faces judged by adults to be unattractive. Two ex periments are described whose aim was to find whether the ''attractive ness effect'' is present soon after birth. In both, pairings of attrac tive and unattractive female faces (as judged by adult raters) were sh own to newborn infants (in the age range 14-151 hours from birth), and in both the infants looked longer at the attractive faces. These find ings can be interpreted either in terms of an innate perceptual mechan ism that detects and responds specifically to faces, or in terms of ra pid learning about faces soon after birth.