A new study of newborns indicates that baby girls, on average, show a greater interest in faces compared to boys. When presented with side-by-side videos of a face and a toy, girls spent proportionally more time watching the face.
The research, published in the journal Biology of Sex Differences, involved 130 babies aged from eight hours to three days old at the Rosie hospital in Cambridge. An eye tracker monitored where the babies looked as they watched a young woman's face and a Newton's cradle toy.
Both sexes showed more interest in the face than the toy, but girls favoured the face more than boys did. Researchers suggest that because the babies were so young, the differences are unlikely to be due to culture or social experience, pointing instead to biological factors like genetics or varying levels of testosterone exposure in the womb.
Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, stated that the research shows "at least some differences are present at a small scale very early on in life." These early differences might play a role in some observed trends, such as girls learning to talk and developing certain social skills earlier on average.