Abstract
Considerable evidence indicates that young infants are finely attuned to the rich information that faces provide about the social environment, including people’s age, gender, identity, and emotional state. This chapter tests the hypothesis that variations in babyfaceness account for infants’ preference for attractive faces documented in past research. Sixteen facial photographs of 18 year old men and women were selected on the basis of previously obtained ratings on 7-point scales of the attractiveness and babyfaceness of a normative sample of 110 men and 120 women that participated in the Oakland Growth Study. Four babyish and two mature faces of each sex were selected from the top and bottom deciles in babyface ratings with the constraint that the babyfaces and maturefaces be matched in attractiveness. Separate analyses of variance were performed on the looking preferences for face pairs varying in attractiveness and those varying in babyfaceness.