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A Review of Attractiveness Preferences in Infancy: From Faces to Objects

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Abstract

Despite some interpersonal variability, judgments of facial attractiveness are largely shared by most individuals, both within and between cultures. Infants are also sensitive to attractive faces even before being influenced by cultural standards of beauty. The intercultural agreement on this matter and its emergence during infancy suggest an evolutionary basis for facial attractiveness. Sensitivity to facial attractiveness is typically understood through evolutionary-based frameworks, either reflecting mate selection mechanisms or emerging as by-products of brain processing and perceptual sensory biases. In the current article, we review data on the emergence and the development of attractiveness preferences in infants, focusing on mechanisms that may explain or contribute to these preferences such as familiarity or fluency in processing. We further discuss the possibility that infants’ preference for attractiveness could extend to other stimuli than faces like objects or visual art. Potential directions for future research are proposed for developmental and comparative approaches.

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Notes

  1. At first glance, spontaneous preferences for familiar stimuli might seem at odds with reports that infants also show novelty preferences. However, novelty preferences are biases experimentally constructed during an experimental study, and obtained using habituation/novelty reaction procedures while familiarity preferences reflect the spontaneous biases that infants developed based on real-life experiences and which are then expressed in the laboratory environment (Aslin, 2007). Accordingly, spontaneous preferences are measured without habituation or familiarization phases preceding the test phase.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Grenoble-Alpes, LPNC, Grenoble, France

    Fabrice Damon, Hélène Mottier, David Méary & Olivier Pascalis

  2. LPNC, CNRS, UMR 5105, Grenoble, France

    Fabrice Damon, Hélène Mottier, David Méary & Olivier Pascalis

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  1. Fabrice Damon
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Damon, F., Mottier, H., Méary, D. et al. A Review of Attractiveness Preferences in Infancy: From Faces to Objects. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 3, 321–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-017-0071-2

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