Newborn girls spent a larger share of their viewing time looking at a woman’s face than newborn boys did in a Cambridge study of visual attention during the first days of life. The research, conducted with 130 healthy newborns at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge, found that female infants devoted about 58.5 percent of their viewing time to the face, compared with about 51.2 percent among male infants.
The study was led by Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and supervised by Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen. It was published on 01 September 2026 in Biology of Sex Differences, Volume 17, article number 155.
Researchers tested 67 male and 63 female infants at a mean age of 33 hours. Each baby was shown side-by-side videos lasting up to 70 seconds. One showed a young woman making eye contact and occasionally smiling. The other showed a Newton’s cradle swinging.
A camera recorded where the infants looked, while trained observers later measured the time each baby directed towards each video. The observers did not know the sex of the baby or the side on which either image had appeared. The researchers also used eye-tracking technology to measure visual attention.
Female newborns showed a preference for the face over the non-social object. Male newborns showed no preference for either video. Girls therefore favoured the face over the toy more than boys did, and females allocated a greater percentage of their viewing time to the face relative to males, with an effect size of d = 0.40.
Both sexes showed more interest in the woman’s face than in the Newton’s cradle clip. The researchers found no difference between males and females in their absolute looking times for either the face or the object. The distinction appeared in the relative pattern of attention: girls directed a greater proportion of their viewing time towards the face.
The findings indicate that sex differences in relative attentional patterns can be present from the earliest days of life. They add evidence to observations that girls, on average, learn to talk earlier than boys and develop certain social skills at a younger age.
The study does not establish whether early differences in attention cause later differences in language or social development. It also leaves open the mechanism behind the pattern, including possible hormonal, genetic, environmental or other influences. The research did not determine whether the difference continues beyond the newborn period, changes with age, or has implications for diagnosis or intervention in autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety or depression.
The researchers’ results describe average differences between groups rather than a rule applying to every infant. There was substantial variation and overlap between boys and girls. The study nevertheless suggests that differences in social attention may emerge far earlier than later childhood measures of social and language development can show.
Comments (0)