NEWBORN babies prefer to look at attractive faces, suggesting that face recognition is hard-wired at birth, rather than learned.
Alan Slater鈥檚 team at the University of Exeter in the UK showed paired images of faces to babies as young as one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. 鈥淎ttractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it鈥檚 innate,鈥� Slater told the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival in Exeter this week.
The preference for pretty faces might arise because attractive people have the prototype human face. If hundreds of faces are merged, the resulting 鈥渁verage face鈥� is very appealing.
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