We can pick a pretty face from day one

By STEVE CONNOR

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but firmly lodged in the brain of even the tiniest of babies, says a study by child psychologists.

Research shows babies are born with a sense of beauty that develops in the womb as part of an innate ability to recognise human faces.

Tests on babies as young as a few hours old have shown they are not just able to distinguish between faces but show a definite preference for faces that adults have judged to be the most attractive.

Scientists think this preference is largely genetically determined and may reflect the need for all babies to be able to recognise human faces as soon as they are born.

Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at Exeter University, said that although newborn babies had never seen a human face they were still capable of quickly learning to recognise not only facial features but whether they were attractive or unattractive.

"If you show infants a few months old two faces - and these are usually female faces but it works with male faces as well - they will spend more time looking at the more attractive face," Dr Slater said.

"The notion was that this was some kind of prototype of the face which was averaged from the various faces the infants have looked at over the first two or three months from birth. But, in fact, we find we get exactly the same effect with newborn infants, which is to say that newborn infants will look at the more attractive of two faces.

"This leads us to the conclusion that babies are born with a fairly detailed representation of the human face that allows them to detect and recognise faces," Dr Slater told the Science Festival in Exeter.

"So attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder, it's in the brain of the newborn infant right from the moment of birth and possibly before birth."

The study used adults to grade a set of photographs of people's faces according to attractiveness.

The scientists then showed pairs of faces deemed the most and the least attractive to a group of newborn babies.

Psychologists have known that babies tend to look in the direction of what interests them most.

Using this trait, the scientists demonstrated that even newborns a few hours old have a preference for an attractive face.

Although it is well established that babies are born with an ability to recognise human facial features, it is the first time researchers have established that they prefer faces adults also consider attractive.

Dr Slater believes the preference is linked with an evolutionary need for babies to be able to identify human faces as soon as they are born.

Babies are known to be able, for instance, to recognise their mother's face within 15 hours of birth, he said.

One explanation could be that the baby has an innate visual template of the human face based on a statistical average of facial features.

"If you average loads of faces then what happens is that the resulting prototype for average - and it is a statistical average rather than a face that looks average - the resulting face is actually an extremely attractive individual," Dr Slater said.

"My line of theorising is that evolution has built in to the developing visual system some innate representation of the face which to all intents and purposes corresponds to a very attractive face," he said.

"They prefer to look at the attractive face because it most closely resembles the prototype or the innate representation that they have which tells them what is a face," Dr Slater told the conference.

The fact that babies seem to like attractive faces does not alter their overriding interest in the face of their own mother, he said.

"All infants are enormously attracted to their mother and this is irrespective of the attractiveness of their mother.

"A lot of this is hard wired and you cannot get away from the hardwiring."

- INDEPENDENT