Newborn girls prefer faces over toys more than boys — SkimNews
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- University of Cambridge researchers tested 130 newborns aged 8 hours to 3 days old at Rosie hospital, using an eye-tracker to record where babies looked when shown side-by-side videos of a woman's face and a Newton's cradle toy.
- Baby girls spent proportionally more time watching the face than boys did, though both sexes preferred the face over the toy; Khan stressed the results reflect average group differences with substantial overlap between the sexes.
- Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, said the babies' age makes cultural or social experience an unlikely driver, leaving genetics and prenatal hormone exposure as the leading explanations.
- The findings, published in the journal Biology of Sex Differences, align with prior work showing average sex differences in brain structure at birth, with male fetuses exposed to more than twice the testosterone of females in the first and second trimesters.
- Khan said the broader research aim is determining whether early biological differences relate to conditions diagnosed more often in one sex — autism and ADHD in males, anxiety and depression in females.
- The researchers hypothesize that heightened social interest from birth may help explain why girls on average acquire speech and certain social skills earlier than boys, though they call this only a hypothesis requiring follow-up studies into toddlerhood.
Why it matters: By testing babies only hours to days old, the Cambridge team eliminates socialization as an explanation for the attention gap, strengthening the case that prenatal biology shapes early sex differences. The work connects to a major clinical question: why autism and ADHD skew male while anxiety and depression skew female. With 130 participants and only average-level differences flagged, the effect is modest, but it is consistent with prior brain-structure findings at birth and may redirect research into the prenatal origins of neurodevelopmental conditions.
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