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Like adults, young infants prefer attractive to unattractive faces (e.g. Langlois, Roggman, Casey, Ritter, Rieser-Danner Slater, von der Schulenburg, Brown, Badenoch, Butterworth, Parsons Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1982). We investigated whether or not 6-month-old infants can categorize faces as attractive or unattractive. In Experiment 1, we familiarized infants to unattractive female faces; in Experiment 2, we familiarized infants to attractive female faces and tested both groups of infants on novel faces from the familiar or novel attractiveness category. Results showed that 6-month-olds categorized attractive and unattractive female faces into two different groups of faces. Experiments 3 and 4 confirmed that infants could discriminate among the faces used in Experiments 1 and 2, and therefore categorized the faces based on their similarities in attractiveness rather than because they could not differentiate among the faces. These findings suggest that categorization of facial attractiveness may underlie the development of the 'beauty is good' stereotype.
Ramsey et al. (Fri,) studied this question.