How does the brain respond to cuteness?
As Kringelbach’s breakthrough research demonstrated, if you stare at a baby’s face, your brain will actually process it very differently to the face of an adult.
“If you look at a fully-grown person, there’s first activity in the retina of your eyes, immediately transferred to the brain regions in the back of your brain. Here your brain makes sense of what you’re seeing and where. There is a special part of the brain, the fusiform face area that responds maximally to faces. However, when you look at babies, there’s activity in your orbitofrontal cortex (an area strongly involved in emotions and pleasures, located just above your eyeballs) at the same time as the activity in the fusiform face area,” he explains.
“In this way, cute babies essentially have a very quick and privileged way of entering our consciousness. They grab our attention so quickly that you are not yet conscious of it – after a seventh of a second of seeing a baby, you get this wave of brain activity that says ‘Woah, that’s a baby! I need to care for it!’”
Researchers have even developed a cuteness rating system based on objective measurements including the proportion of forehead to overall face, cheek chubbiness, and how big the eyes are.
In addition, scientists have found artificially boosting a baby’s cuteness score using photo-editing software could elicit a stronger cuteness response in humans. Adorability, in other words, can be engineered.
But although you might need a bit of computer wizardry to increase your cuteness score, lowering it simply takes a bit of ageing.
“When you’re an infant, you have a high cuteness rating, but this lowers as you get older and those proportions change. With age, suddenly facial features no longer grab us in the same way – it doesn’t elicit the same selective attentional response,” says Kringelbach.
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However, cuteness isn’t all about sight. As Kringelbach’s research has highlighted, sounds can also trigger the same cuteness response in the brain. “Sounds like laughing babies can elicit a big response in your reward centre. If you ever need your Monday fix, just type ‘laughing babies’ into YouTube!” he says.
And there’s smell – a whiff of a baby’s head can also prompt the same reaction in the reward centre. “At that point in a human’s life, the skull hasn’t closed – the fontanelle [the soft spot on a baby’s head] is still there. The exact smell is something hard to quantify, but we are working on it!” says Kringelbach.
“This could be a signal coming through to us of how dogs have evolved to rely on human care … being able to connect with us, to find an emotional hook with us is what actually makes their lives possible.”
“My Weimaraner’s name is Todd (as in, “why is the carpet all wet, TODD?!”) and the Blue Tick Coon Hound’s name is Hansel (Hansel, so hot right now. Hansel),” Seth Friedrich from Pekin, Illinois says. “There is just something about the hound breeds faces that makes you go “oh. my. GAWD.” Maybe it’s the big eyes, maybe it’s the wrinkles, maybe it’s the general floppy-ness….Whatever it is, the combination of confusion, concern, and derpy-ness adds up to a very, very cute puppy.”
The team asked participants to rank various dogs’ cuteness based on a series of black-and-white photos. Three dog breeds were selected for testing: Jack Russell terriers, cane corsos, and white shepherds, all pictured at different ages.
Several dog owners confirmed to Inverse that their dogs are indeed perfect and lovable at any age.
“Around seven or eight weeks of age, just as their mother is getting sick of them and is going to kick them out of the den and they’re going to have to make their own way in life, at that age, that is exactly when they are most attractive to human beings,” Wynne, director of Arizona State University’s Canine Science Collaboratory, explains in a statement.
In humans, and other animals, this response is an evolved, innate behaviour that motivates adults to look after helpless infants, and to be more sensitive to their needs and feelings. It makes sense, then, that a recent study found that puppies reach peak cuteness at eight weeks of age, just the time when their canine mothers leave them to fend for themselves.
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With their big, round eyes, button noses and large heads, puppies share many of the same physical characteristics as human babies. And like babies, as well as kittens, teddies and many cartoon characters, puppies provoke in us an automatic ‘cute response’. They grab our attention, we enjoy looking at them and, at a neural level, they trigger activity associated with reward and also compassion and empathy.
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Its official: from as young as three-years of age we are predisposed to appreciate “cuteness” in puppies, kittens and babies. Apparently dogs are also most definitely mans best friend, with the same academic study showing that their faces trump our fondness of other humans and cats.
This revelation — which beyond being a great excuse for the hours spent watching kitten videos, also provides clues about human evolution — has been provided by a pair of PhD students at the University of Lincoln. It is based on the theory of
Kindchenschema, proposed by famed ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Also known as “baby schema”, it is the idea that humans are predisposed to respond to “cute” features — typically a round face, high forehead, huge eyes and a small nose and mouth — with a desire to protect and provide care. The features are thought to be interpreted as belonging to a vulnerable entity that needs protecting, heightening our threat alert.
A 2007 study monitoring brain activity in people looking at s of babies showed that our attention system does indeed prioritise “biologically significant positive stimuli”. Two years later, another study went on to show that viewing super cute s of puppies and kittens — as opposed to kinda-cute photos of fully-grown cats and dogs — actually led to enhanced fine-motor skills in participants (when asked to play Operation). “This suggests that the human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young,” the authors of that study speculate.Most Popular
The University of Lincoln pair wanted to interrogate the subject further by investigating how the human-animal bond is impacted by the baby schema, and whether our response changes with age.
Although they probably could have evaluated human attraction to puppies and kittens by recording the squeals of delight, the pair focused on eye-tracking to see if children aged between three- and six-years-old had the same reactions adults have been known to. In one experiment, they traced which facial features the children focused on, and in another they asked the children to rate the cuteness of the faces depicted.
Just to ensure the pictures used were particularly cute, the researchers modified them digitally to ensure they were as cute as possible (the biggest eyes and cutest button nose — without being Disney creepy, obviously). Those same s were also modified to have the far less appealing low-forehead and beady eyes of us adults. The s were shown side-by-side in a total of 24 pairs.
In the first study, the children received encouragement to look at the pictures over a total period of about 10 minutes, and received a small gift and sticker for their troubles. In another study, different children were asked to rate the s on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being very cute). Adults were also put through the same two experiments (though we believe no gift or sticker was involved).
Frontiers in Psychology: Developmental Psychology, that, on average, children spent more time looking at the extra cute s, regardless of what species was depicted. The second experiment confirmed their suspicions. Its true, even three-year-olds are desperately attracted to s of kittens and puppies. Furthermore, s of adult dogs were shown to be preferential to other adult faces — cats followed in second place, and finally humans. The children spent 78 percent of the time looking at specific features — the eyes, nose and mouth. “Our results provide the first rigorous demonstration that a visual preference for these traits emerges very early during development,” says coauthor Marta Borgi. “Independently of the species viewed, children in our study spent more time looking at s with a higher degree of these baby-like features.”
The authors do recognise that future studies need to take into account not just whether the children have pets at home (which they already had) but whether they have a degree of involvement in the pets care. This could, of course, impact their interest. They also need to explore how much the attentiveness to the cute s is based upon a need to nurture the animal/baby in question. Since “cuteness” has already been associated with a willingness in adults to adopt a baby, the same might be shown of adopting a keen dog and cat, the authors suggest. The extension of this would be how humans care for their respective pets, according to how conventionally attractive they are. “We now need to find out if that attractiveness may override childrens ability to recognise stress signalling in dogs,” said coauthor professor Kerstin Meints. “This study will also lead to further research with an impact on real life, namely whether the
cuteness of an animal in rescue centres makes them more or less likely to be adopted.”
Beyond these things, however, there could be significant ways to build upon this knowledge to implement better education systems, the Lincoln pair suggest. “Since attention is one of the key aspects of the learning process, interacting with animals may represent a mean for promoting cognitive development — e.g. by enhancing motor skills and ability to follow instructions and by improving memory,” write the authors. “Thus future research on the attentional aspect of childrens relationships with pet animals should be encouraged. In addition, the analysis of specific animal characteristics able to elicit emotional/affiliative responses in children could ultimately help develop interventions for children with deficit in the social domain by providing salient and emotionally relevant stimuli (e.g., helping in developing socially interactive robots for the utilisation of animals as a model for social robotics.”
And so the cycle of a near perfect experiment is complete. It began with showing cute pictures of kittens, puppies and babies to three-year-olds, and ends with a declaration that animal robots could be the key to our future wellbeing.