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Thursday, 29 November 2012

Babies can spot pretty face right from birth

By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent
Times Online, Sept 6, 2004


BEAUTY is not in the eye of the beholder: British scientists have discovered that human infants are born with an innate concept of what makes an attractive face.


The findings suggest that ideals of facial beauty are not determined by culture alone, but also rely on universal standards that have been hard-wired, or imprinted, in our genes.

“Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder, it is in the brains of newborn infants, right from the moment of birth,” said Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist who led the study. “This view contradicts views arguing that the newborn infant enters the world as a tabula rasa — a blank slate on which experience will write.”

Dr Slater will present the results this week at the British Assocation Festival of Science at Exeter University.

Though infants cannot tell scientists that they prefer this face or that, a large volume of research has shown that their attention is much more easily captured by images they find pleasing or interesting.

In the new study, Dr Slater’s team used this effect to test whether newborns with little or no experience of the world shared their elders’ assumptions about facial beauty. The researchers took hundreds of pictures of female members of the public, and asked adult volunteers to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to five.

Dr Slater then paired particularly beautiful faces, with an average score of close to five, with particularly unattractive ones scoring close to one. Care was taken to match qualities such as hair colour and length that might otherwise interfere with the experiment. Almost 100 newborn babies, with an average age of two days, were then shown these paired images.

About 80 per cent of the time the babies looked exclusively or mainly at the face judged “prettier”. The effect was also seen when the experiment was repeated with male faces and faces from many different ethnic groups.
Dr Slater said: “A lot of it is hard-wired, and you can’t get away from that hard-wiring.”

There are two probable evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon. First, facial symmetry — which is strongly linked to beauty across cultures — may be an “honest” signal of good genes, good health and an absence of parasitic diseases.

We may be primed to recognise this as a way of selecting sexual partners with the best breeding prospects. Second, the preference could be a by-product of an evolved mental capacity to recognise faces from birth. It is thought that babies fit faces to some sort of average facial template.


Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Beauty Is in the Brain of the Beholder

Ideals of facial beauty are not determined by culture alone, but also rely on universal standards that have been hard-wired, or imprinted, in our brains. Even babies can spot pretty face right from birth.


Live Science, 6 July 2011 - Whether you're admiring a painting or enjoying a song, all the works of art you favor lead to activity in the same region of the brain, a new study shows. The findings go some way to support the view that beauty is in the perception of the beholder rather than in the object.

Researchers asked 21 volunteers from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds to rate a series of paintings or pieces of music as beautiful, indifferent or ugly. Participants then looked at the pictures or listened to the music while lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity.


That the same area of the brain was activated for both visual and auditory beauty implies that beauty exists as an abstract concept within the brain, researchers from the University College London's Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology say.


The finding showed that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is part of the brain's pleasure and reward center, was more active in participants when they listened to music or viewed a picture that they had rated as beautiful. However, no particular region of the brain correlated generally with artwork rated as ugly.

Activity in another region, the caudate nucleus, located near the center of the brain, increased in proportion to the relative visual beauty of a painting. The region has been previously reported to correlate with romantic love, suggesting a neural association for the relationship between beauty and love.


The findings were published today (July 6) in the journal PLoS One.

Remi Melina, Live Science Staff Writer