What Makes Babies and Animals 'Cute'? New Study Reveals What Children Think

Baby-like characteristics make both people and animals look cuter, but what do actual babies think of these traits? That's something that researchers wanted to find out. It turns out that children as young as three are able to recognize the same "cute" features that encourage caregiving behavior in adults.

The baby schema, which includes a round face, high forehead, big eyes and a small nose and mouth, has been proven to engender protective, care-giving behavior in adults. That said, researchers have long wondered whether or not babies could also recognize the baby schema.

The researchers conducted two experiments with children between the ages of three and sex. One tracked the eye movements to see what facial areas the children were drawn to while the other assessed how cute the children rated animals and humans with infantile traits. In each experiment, the children were shown pictures of human adults and babies, dogs, puppies, cats and kittens. These pictures were digitally manipulated to appear "cuter" by applying baby schema characteristics.

So what did they find? It turns out that the children could tell which pictures were "cuter." They preferred the digitally enhanced photos with baby schema characteristics.

"Our results provide the first rigorous demonstration that a visual preference for these traits emerges very early during development. Independent of the species viewed, children in our study spent more time looking at images with a higher degree of these baby-like features," said Marta Borgi, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Interestingly, while participants gave different cuteness scores to dogs, cats and humans, they all found the images of adult dog faces cuter than both adult cats and human faces."

The findings reveal a bit more about how children view "cute" animals and people. In addition, it may also lead to future research that examines whether or not an animal in rescue centers makes them more or less likely to be adopted.

The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.