Newborn Girls Prefer Faces More Than Boys, Study Finds — SkimNews
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- Cambridge researchers tested 130 newborns aged 8 hours to 3 days at the Rosie hospital, finding girls spent proportionally more time watching a woman's face than boys did when shown side-by-side videos of a face and a Newton's cradle toy.
- Both sexes preferred the woman's face over the toy, but girls showed a stronger face preference than boys.
- Because the babies were hours to days old, the researchers ruled out cultural or social experience, pointing to biological factors such as genetics and prenatal testosterone exposure as leading explanations.
- Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, said the findings show that at least some sex differences are present 'at a small scale very early on in life.'
- The team stressed the findings reflect average group differences with significant overlap between individual boys and girls, and do not apply to all members of either sex.
- The study connects to a broader question about why autism and ADHD are more commonly diagnosed in males while anxiety and depression are more common in females.
- Previous research has found similar on-average sex differences in brain structure at birth, with male foetuses exposed to more than twice the testosterone level of females in the first and second trimesters.
Why it matters: This Cambridge study of 130 newborns, too young for social influence, adds biological evidence to the long-running nature vs. nurture debate on sex differences. Researchers tie the attention gap to prenatal testosterone exposure, offering potential clues to why autism skews male and anxiety and depression skew female.
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