Sweet Puppies and Cute Babies: Perceptual Adaptation to Babyfacedness Transfers across Species

Infant faces are very salient stimuli. The Kindchenschema describes specific features that characterize a cute infant face. In this study we used a visual adaptation paradigm to investigate the universality of the perceptual properties of the Kindchenschema. In Experiment 1, twenty-four participants adapted to cute and less cute human infant faces and in Experiment 2, twenty-four new participants adapted to cute and less cute faces of puppy dogs. In both experiments the task was to assess the cuteness of subsequently presented human infant faces. The results revealed cuteness after-effects for human infant faces in both adaptation conditions, suggesting a common mechanism coding cuteness in human and non-human faces. This study provides experimental evidence for the universality of the well-described concept of the Kindchenschema.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2013-03-13

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0058248PMID 23516453PMCID 3596402
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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