The research involved 26 mothers of infants aged between six and ten months, recruited from participants in the ongoing Bukhali randomised controlled trial, a complex continuum-of-care intervention in Soweto that begins before conception and continues through early childhood. Between 1 and 5 May 2023, the team conducted four focus group discussions lasting between 80 and 114 minutes, each involving five to eight mothers. The participants ranged from 20 to 29 years of age, and for 17 of them the study child was their first. Only four mothers were employed at the time. The most common home languages were isiZulu and Sesotho, and discussions were facilitated in English with explanation in local languages where needed, allowing participants to express themselves freely in their home tongue.

Methodologically, the team used reflexive thematic analysis, a widely applied qualitative approach developed by Braun and Clarke that treats coding and theme development as inherently subjective processes. The analysis proceeded in two stages. First, transcripts were indexed deductively against the World Health Organization’s Nurturing Care Framework, the dominant global roadmap for early childhood development, which identifies five components of nurturing care: good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, safety and security, and opportunities for early learning. In the second stage, refined analytic subcodes were generated inductively from the data itself, allowing themes to emerge from the mothers’ own words rather than from the framework’s definitions. The authors acknowledge that anchoring the initial analysis to the framework risked confirmation bias, but argue that the two-stage design preserved space for genuinely new findings while keeping the work connected to the broader evidence base.

The first major theme concerned mothers’ goals and their sense of their own role. Far from viewing infants as passive recipients of care, the mothers described themselves as active agents in their children’s learning from the earliest months. “It’s folded while it’s still wet mama. You train them now,” one mother said, invoking a proverb about shaping cloth before it dries. “Every day you are teaching your child something new,” another added. During infancy, the most frequently cited markers of healthy development were weight gain and physical growth, with mothers describing genuine excitement when the scale went up at clinic visits. A good appetite was a central goal, and feeding difficulties were a notable source of stress. Alongside this, mothers repeatedly used the word “active” as a broader indicator of wellbeing, encompassing motor, socioemotional and cognitive development in a single everyday concept that went beyond the narrow metric of weight.

Looking further ahead, the mothers’ aspirations shifted in revealing ways. Very few mentioned wanting their child to be intelligent. Instead, they emphasised social adjustment: liking, respecting and accepting other people, fitting in, and being “normal” or “like other children.” One mother put it vividly: “I want my child to like people. I want them to accept people, who they are and their situations. If they visit someone and they find that at that place they are eating cabbage, they should eat cabbage with them, they should not be judgemental.” Others spoke of calmness, self-knowledge and independence, qualities the researchers interpret as a broader vision of self-mastery rather than a narrow focus on cognitive attainment. Yet when asked directly about school readiness, mothers readily acknowledged their role as first teachers, pointing to basic numeracy and literacy, naming colours and shapes, and the knowledge children should carry with them into the classroom.

The second theme may prove the study’s most consequential contribution: the idea that nurturing care is bidirectional. Rather than a one-way delivery of services from caregiver to child, the mothers described a relationship in which both parties shape and benefit from each other. They spoke of the joy of watching first noises and small developmental leaps, of bonds that made hard circumstances bearable. “Being a mother is a really wonderful thing, seeing your child’s development as they get older, that bond,” one said. Several described talking to their babies as a form of emotional release, with one recounting a friend’s advice that “your child is your therapist.” The mothers also described routines responsive to their infants’ individual preferences for food and sleep, and stressed the importance of being calm, patient and loving. This is not to say caregiving was effortless: many reported stress, insecurity, feeding struggles and inconsolable crying, along with a near-total loss of personal time and sleep.

This emphasis on maternal enjoyment stands in deliberate contrast to the Nurturing Care Framework, which the authors describe as fundamentally outcome-oriented, framing improvements in child development in terms of benefits to the child and to society through future economic returns. The framework acknowledges the emotional bond created by mutually enjoyable interactions only briefly. Yet behavioural science suggests that enjoyment associated with an activity motivates its repetition, and that positive emotion during caregiving is associated with greater responsiveness and cognitive stimulation, while negative emotion predicts reduced sensitivity. The authors point back to John Bowlby, the pioneer of attachment theory, who argued as early as 1951 that what matters for mental health is a warm, intimate and continuous relationship in which both infant and mother find satisfaction and enjoyment. On that logic, parenting interventions that emphasise immediate affective rewards, such as joy, rather than long-term developmental outcomes, may be more likely to succeed in changing behaviour.

The third theme mapped the external forces shaping caregiving, and the picture is one of layered, sometimes contradictory influences. Many participants lived in single-parent households with fathers largely absent, though some described supportive partners contributing financially, emotionally and physically. Where fathers were absent, maternal grandmothers often stepped in, and advice from elders was generally welcomed, even when it clashed with modern conveniences. One mother contrasted her own generation’s reliance on branded instant baby cereals with the older generation’s home-cooked pap and stews. Commercial products, from Purity and Nestum foods to walking rings, the wheeled frames that let infants move upright, featured prominently in daily routines. Community attitudes were ambivalent: some mothers appreciated strangers’ interest in their babies, while others, citing dangerous environments and even fears related to witchcraft, trusted no one, including mothers-in-law, with their child.

Screens emerged as a pervasive and largely unexamined presence. Most mothers reported regular use of phones and cartoons such as Cocomelon, typically to keep infants occupied while they completed domestic tasks, though some also cited educational benefits. Only one mother mentioned reading books with her child, and her account, in which her own mother dismissed the practice as “white people things,” suggests how culturally loaded such activities can be. A few mothers worried about dependence, with one deliberately limiting phone use after noticing how instantly it silenced her crying baby. The authors note that South African evidence suggests children’s screen time likely exceeds national guideline levels, and that passive screen use may displace the interactive, responsive caregiving that drives development. Notably, the Nurturing Care Framework does not mention screens at all, focusing its early learning guidance on books and toys. The authors argue future revisions should confront the reality that screens dominate many children’s daily experience, and point to emerging international guidance that offers practical advice on content quality and boundaries rather than simple prohibition.

The study’s implications are tempered by its limitations, which the authors state candidly. All participants were drawn from an ongoing trial and were engaged with health services, and many had already received the infancy component of the Bukhali intervention, which addresses responsive caregiving, so their awareness of nurturing care may exceed that of the general population. The hospital-based setting of the discussions may have shaped responses, and the views of fathers and other caregivers were not captured. Social desirability bias, a standard hazard of focus groups, cannot be excluded, though the authors note that participants freely shared critical views on crèches, screen time and absent fathers, suggesting candour prevailed. Even so, the findings align with a growing body of qualitative work across urban Africa showing that caregivers recognise their influence on development and value loving bonds, while challenging assumptions of developmental universalism embedded in many parenting interventions. The message from Soweto is deceptively simple: mothers already know they are their children’s first teachers, they already enjoy the relationship, and interventions that build on that joy, rather than lecturing about outcomes, may be the ones that finally stick.

Subject of Research: Caregiving practices, beliefs and nurturing care during infancy in Soweto, South Africa

Article Title: “A Baby is Like an Empty USB. Whatever You Do, They Store It”: A Qualitative Study of Caregiving Practices and Beliefs in Soweto, South Africa

Article References: Palmer, T., Nkosi, N., Motlhatlhedi, M., Prost, A., Skordis, J., Gram, L., Norris, S. A., Batura, N., & Draper, C. E. (2026). “A Baby is Like an Empty USB. Whatever You Do, They Store It”: A Qualitative Study of Caregiving Practices and Beliefs in Soweto, South Africa. Journal of Child and Family Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-026-03392-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10826-026-03392-0

Keywords: early childhood development, nurturing care, Soweto, South Africa, infancy, caregiving, responsive caregiving, Nurturing Care Framework, qualitative research, screen time, maternal wellbeing, parenting interventions

The study drew on the STAARS cohort, the Studying Autism and ADHD Risk in Siblings project, recruited through the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. Families were enrolled if they had a first-degree relative with a clinical diagnosis of autism, a clinical or probable research diagnosis of ADHD, or if they had typically developing older children and no first-degree relatives with either condition. The final sample comprised 79 infants with an elevated likelihood of autism, 31 with an elevated likelihood of ADHD, 21 with elevated likelihood of both conditions, and 29 with typical likelihood for neither. Each child visited the lab at five, ten and fourteen months for eye-tracking sessions, and returned for developmental and language assessments at 36 months, allowing the researchers to connect infant gaze patterns with later language outcomes.

The experimental task was elegantly simple. At each visit, infants watched pairs of ten-second silent videos of a woman’s face presented side by side on a screen. In each pair, the mouth flashed open and closed at one of three temporal frequencies: a slow one hertz, a mid-range six hertz, or a fast ten to fifteen hertz, depending on the age of the infant. The mid-frequency condition is scientifically crucial because fluent speech carries most of its energy in the theta band, roughly four to eight hertz, the rhythm at which syllables are produced. Neural oscillations in this theta range are thought to be central to how the brain segments and processes speech, and previous work has shown that even newborns show theta-frequency neural activity related to speech perception. The researchers wanted to know whether babies’ eyes are drawn to mouths moving at this language-relevant rhythm.

Gaze was recorded with a Tobii TX-300 infrared eye tracker sampling at 120 hertz while infants sat on a parent’s lap. The team computed an eye-mouth looking index, or EMI, defined as the proportion of face-directed looking time spent on the eyes relative to the eyes plus the mouth combined. An index above 0.5 signals a preference for the eyes; below 0.5, a preference for the mouth. Trials with fewer than 25 percent valid gaze samples were discarded, and the longitudinal data were analysed with generalised linear mixed models, a statistical framework well suited to the missing data and bounded proportions that characterise infant eye-tracking studies.

The developmental pattern was clear. Across the whole sample, the eye-mouth index declined significantly between five and fourteen months, meaning that as babies grew older they shifted their attention progressively away from the eyes and toward the mouth. This replicates a well-established trajectory: typically developing infants look predominantly at the eyes before about five months of age and then increasingly favour the mouth through the first year, precisely the period during which they begin to comprehend and produce their first words. Interestingly, the researchers did not observe the re-orienting back toward the eyes around twelve months that some earlier studies reported, and they note that other work has found mouth attention persisting in both monolingual and bilingual children up to age five, supporting the idea that watching a moving mouth is adaptive for language learning.

Temporal frequency also mattered. Infants looked more at the eyes relative to the mouth when watching the slow one hertz faces than when watching the six hertz, speech-like faces. In other words, mouths moving at the rhythm of syllabic speech captured more attention than slowly moving mouths, providing partial behavioural support for the idea that human infants, like rhesus monkeys in earlier work by Asif Ghazanfar and colleagues, are perceptually tuned to theta-frequency facial movement. The effect was not exclusive, however: there was no significant difference in looking between the mid-frequency and high-frequency conditions, suggesting that the tuning is not a narrow bandpass filter but perhaps reflects a broader preference shaped by arousal and stimulus salience, which the authors flag as a target for future research measuring physiological arousal.

The most striking findings concerned family history. Infants with an elevated likelihood of autism showed a significantly larger eye-mouth index than infants with typical likelihood, meaning they looked relatively more at the eyes and less at the mouth across infancy. The authors interpret this as a possible developmental delay in the usual shift from eyes to mouth, since prolonged eye preference is normally a feature of younger infants. Crucially, this effect was attenuated when there was also a family history of ADHD: the interaction between autism and ADHD familial likelihood was significant, and at fourteen months the EL-autism group showed a larger index than the EL-autism-plus-ADHD group. A family history of ADHD on its own was also associated with more eye relative to mouth looking at fourteen months, a novel result in a population that has been almost entirely neglected by the eye-tracking literature. The authors argue that future family-history studies of autism should systematically map ADHD in the family, because its presence may mask or modify the effects researchers are trying to detect, potentially explaining some of the heterogeneity in previous reports.

Language added a further layer of nuance. At fourteen months, infants who had already said their first words, as measured by an item on the Mullen Scales of Early Learning, showed a smaller concurrent eye-mouth index, that is, more mouth looking, than infants who had not yet produced words, with a medium-to-large effect. This fits the experience-dependent view of face attention: once babies begin talking, watching mouth movements may help them refine and imitate the shapes of words they hear from speakers. Yet the long-term picture was more surprising. When the researchers controlled for fourteen-month word status, higher receptive language scores at 36 months were associated with greater looking to the eyes, not the mouth, across infancy. This ran counter to the authors’ prediction and to some previous findings linking mouth preference to better later language. One interpretation, drawing on recent work by Viktorsson and colleagues, is that looking at the eyes supports gaze following and joint attention, which are themselves foundational for word learning. The takeaway, the authors suggest, is that both eyes and mouth matter: mouth looking serves emerging language skills in the moment, while eye engagement relates to the interpersonal foundations of language that come to fruition in toddlerhood.

Not every hypothesis was confirmed. There were no significant differences between likelihood groups in parent-reported comprehension or production vocabulary at fourteen months on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, although girls comprehended significantly more words than boys, consistent with the broader literature on early sex differences in language. Nor did the frequency effect interact with word status, and neither expressive nor receptive language at 36 months related to infant EMI until first-word status was taken into account. The authors are candid about the limitations of their design. The silent videos isolated mouth movement in a way naturalistic speech does not, arousal was not measured, and the cohort, though prospective and well characterised, was underpowered to examine actual autism or ADHD diagnoses as outcomes. Causal conclusions are therefore off the table.

Even with those caveats, the study delivers a message that resonates well beyond specialist circles: the way a baby looks at a face is not a single fixed trait but a moving target shaped by age, by the rhythm of the face itself, by the constellation of conditions in the family, and by the child’s own blossoming language. For researchers hunting early markers of neurodevelopmental conditions, the implication is that heterogeneous findings may partly reflect unmeasured heterogeneity in the samples, particularly the under-appreciated role of familial ADHD. For parents, the study offers no cause for alarm but a fascinating window into the infant mind, revealing that from the earliest months, babies are already calibrating their gaze to the rhythms of human communication, sampling eyes and mouths in a dynamic balance that foreshadows the conversational partners they will one day become.

Subject of Research: Infant eye-tracking study of visual attention to eyes versus mouths in relation to familial autism and ADHD likelihood and language development

Article Title: Infant Attention to Eyes Versus Mouth Varies With Mouth Movement Speed, Family History of Autism and Language Development

Article References: Agyapong, M., Mason, L., Begum Ali, J., Johnson, M. H., Charman, T., Jones, E. J. H., the STAARS Team, Bazelmans, T., Dafner, L., Ersoy, M., Gliga, T., Goodwin, A., Haartsen, R., Halkola, H., Hendry, A., Holman, R., Kalwarowsky, S., Kolesnik, A., Lloyd-Fox, S., … Taylor, C. (2026). Infant Attention to Eyes Versus Mouth Varies With Mouth Movement Speed, Family History of Autism and Language Development. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07516-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07516-9

Keywords: autism, ADHD, infancy, eye-tracking, language development, visual attention, face scanning, theta frequency, family history, longitudinal study, social attention, developmental psychology

The motivation behind the study is a stubborn clinical gap. Early childhood is widely recognized as the period in which intervention can most powerfully shape developmental trajectories, yet a formal diagnosis of autism is often not made until around age three. Social-communication differences may be observable long before that, but families and clinicians frequently lack objective, structured ways to capture them. The researchers asked a deceptively simple question: if you go back and watch babies on video, can you see, item by item, which pre-pragmatic and language behaviors were present or absent in those who would later receive an autism diagnosis?

To answer it, the team designed a single-center retrospective case-control study conducted at the Bursa Anka Special Education and Rehabilitation Center in Türkiye between November 2022 and June 2023. They assembled home videos recorded from birth to twelve months of age for thirty children: fifteen who were later diagnosed with ASD and fifteen typically developing (TD) peers. All evaluations relied on pre-existing data sources, including archived video recordings and caregiver-provided contextual information, and no diagnostic or therapeutic intervention was introduced for research purposes. The study received ethical approval from the Istanbul Atlas University Non-Interventional Scientific Research Ethics Committee and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The analytical framework was unusually granular. Rather than assigning a single global score to each child, the researchers coded communication behaviors as simply present or absent using structured checklists across three domains: receptive language, with 61 items; expressive language, with 41 items; and pre-pragmatic skills, the foundational social-communication abilities such as joint attention and gesture use that precede and support pragmatic language, with 19 items. In total, 121 candidate behavioral outcomes were assembled, of which 120 proved analyzable. This item-level approach matters because early autism-related differences are rarely confined to a single behavior; they are distributed across a constellation of subtle social and linguistic signals.

The statistical machinery was equally careful. Between-group differences for each item were tested with two-sided Fisher’s exact tests, a method well suited to small samples and binary outcomes. Effect sizes were estimated as odds ratios with 95 percent confidence intervals, and, crucially, the team applied Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) correction within each domain. With 120 simultaneous comparisons, uncorrected significance thresholds would inevitably flag many differences by chance alone; the FDR procedure filters out those statistical mirages while retaining genuine signals. The researchers were explicit that the goal was to identify group-level candidate early behavioral indicators, not to evaluate diagnostic or screening accuracy.

The results were striking in both breadth and consistency. Of the 120 analyzable items, 63, or 52.5 percent, differed between the ASD and TD groups at the conventional p < .05 threshold, and 55 items, or 45.8 percent, remained significant after FDR correction. The receptive language domain showed the highest proportion of robust differences, with 35 of 61 items, or 57.4 percent, surviving correction. Expressive language followed with 15 of 41 items, or 36.6 percent, and pre-pragmatic skills with 5 of 18 items, or 27.8 percent. Most telling of all was the directionality: 54 of the 55 FDR-significant items showed lower endorsement in the ASD group. In other words, the differences were not a scattered mix of excesses and deficits but an overwhelmingly one-directional pattern of reduced or absent early communication behaviors.

The prominence of receptive language is particularly noteworthy. Understanding spoken language in the first year of life depends on a web of prerequisite skills: orienting to voices, following a caregiver’s gaze, connecting sounds to objects and events. Decades of research have linked joint attention, the shared focus of two people on an object or event, to later language growth, and prospective studies have shown that infants who later develop autism often show declining attention to eyes and reduced response to their own name within the first two years. The present findings fit squarely within that tradition, but they add something practical: a structured, item-level map of which everyday receptive behaviors, observable in ordinary home footage, most reliably distinguish the two groups at the group level.

The study also connects to a long lineage of home-movie research. Since the early 2000s, investigators have combed family videos of first-birthday parties and everyday play to identify behavioral signs that precede diagnosis, from Osterling and Dawson’s landmark retrospective analyses to computational studies that trained algorithms on parent-infant interactions. What distinguishes the new work is its systematic checklist architecture spanning three communication domains and its rigorous multiple-comparison control, which together reduce the subjectivity that has historically limited retrospective video coding. The approach also complements prospective designs, such as baby-sibling studies, by tapping a naturally occurring record of behavior in children not recruited before birth.

The authors are careful, and rightly so, about what the study does not show. Because the design is retrospective and the sample is small, with fifteen children per group drawn from a single center, the findings identify candidate indicators rather than validated screening tools. Retrospective video analysis carries inherent limitations: footage is not collected systematically, camera angles and recording contexts vary, and the mere presence of a camera can subtly alter family behavior. The researchers explicitly state that their results do not validate a screening or diagnostic method. Instead, they suggest a more modest but still valuable clinical application: retrospective home-video review as an adjunctive tool in developmental history taking, giving clinicians a structured way to mine the visual record that families already possess.

Even with those caveats, the implications are compelling. If a broad swath of early language and pre-pragmatic behaviors is measurably reduced in the first year of life among children later diagnosed with autism, then the window for earlier identification is wider than current diagnostic practice assumes. Earlier detection matters because early behavioral intervention has been shown in meta-analyses to improve social communication outcomes, and the developing brain’s plasticity in infancy offers a developmental opportunity that narrows with time. The next steps are clear from the study’s own framing: larger, multi-center samples; prospective validation of the candidate items; and eventually, perhaps, integration of structured video coding, possibly assisted by computational methods, into routine developmental surveillance. For now, the message is that the first clues may already be sitting in the family video archive, waiting for a careful eye.

Subject of Research: Video-based retrospective analysis of early language and pre-pragmatic communication behaviors in infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder

Article Title: Video-Based Analysis of Language and Pre-Pragmatic Skills for Identifying Autism Risk in Infancy: A Case-Observation Study

Article References: Video-Based Analysis of Language and Pre-Pragmatic Skills for Identifying Autism Risk in Infancy: A Case-Observation Study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07556-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07556-1

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, early identification, home video analysis, receptive language, expressive language, pre-pragmatic skills, infancy, language development, case-control study, developmental screening, joint attention, social communication

The research team, led by Yumnah T. Khan of the Autism Research Centre in the Department of Psychiatry, together with colleagues including Alex Tsompanidis, Carrie Allison, neonatologist Topun Austin, and Simon Baron-Cohen, tested 130 newborns, 67 males and 63 females, at a mean age of just 33 hours after birth. That extraordinarily tight window is the study’s methodological centrepiece. Infants tested at 33 hours of life have experienced almost none of the social world: no extended eye contact, no named gender, no toys, no language, and no deliberate socialisation. Any behavioural difference observed at this stage, the researchers argue, is far harder to attribute to learning than differences measured in older babies, toddlers, or children.

The experimental design was deliberately minimal. Each newborn was presented simultaneously with a video of a human face and a video of a non-social object, while gaze-tracking equipment recorded precisely where the infant looked and for how long. The stimuli were matched in their presentation, and the infants’ spontaneous looking behaviour served as the sole measure. Eye-tracking is the gold standard for interrogating early attention because newborns cannot follow verbal instructions, and their visual behaviour is one of the few channels through which the hidden architecture of their emerging cognition can be observed at all.

The results split into two revealing layers. When the researchers analysed percentage looking time — the proportion of total looking devoted to the face rather than the object — female newborns on average allocated a greater percentage of their attention to the face than male newborns did. The effect size was moderate, at Cohen’s d of 0.40, a magnitude that is meaningful in behavioural science without being dramatic. When the analysis shifted to absolute looking times, an equally nuanced pattern appeared: females showed a genuine preference, looking longer at the face than at the non-social object, whereas males showed no preference for either stimulus.

Crucially, however, the team found no statistically significant differences between the sexes in the absolute amount of time each group spent looking at the face, or at the object. That absence is what elevates the study above a simple headline. The sex difference is not that girls look more at faces in total, nor that boys look less; it is that girls distribute their attention differently between the two types of stimuli. Sex differences in this experiment live in the relative allocation of attention — in the internal comparison an infant appears to make between a social signal and a non-social one — rather than in raw visual appetite.

The significance of that distinction extends to how scientists interpret the causes of behavioural sex differences more broadly. Decades of research have documented on-average psychological differences between males and females, from interests and social orientation to the prevalence of particular neurodevelopmental conditions. But the scientific community remains divided over the engines of those differences. One camp emphasises gender socialisation: from birth, children are treated, spoken to, and encouraged differently depending on their sex, and any observed divergence could in principle be the residue of that immersion. The other camp allows for partial biological contributions, notably prenatal sex hormones such as testosterone, which differ systematically between male and female foetuses and are known to influence brain development.

Newborns are among the very few human populations capable of adjudicating between these accounts, at least in principle. Because infants at 33 hours have had negligible postnatal social experience, a reliable behavioural difference at this age suggests that something occurring before or at birth — prenatal hormones, genetic factors, or differences in maturational tempo — may contribute to the earliest organisation of social attention. The Cambridge team is careful, in its published abstract and plain-language summary, to frame prenatal sex hormones as one possible explanation rather than a proven cause. They also name two credible alternatives that the current design cannot fully exclude.

The first alternative concerns maturation. Male and female foetuses develop on slightly different schedules, and differences in the maturity of visual or attentional systems at birth could produce divergent looking patterns without any specifically social mechanism being involved. A less visually mature infant might, for instance, engage more diffusely with both stimuli, diluting any face preference. The second alternative concerns the stimuli themselves. Low-level visual properties — contrast, motion, complexity, colour, luminance — can drive infant looking independently of whether a stimulus is social. If the face video happened to possess visual features that interact differently with male and female early visual systems, the observed effect could reflect those properties rather than the face’s social meaning. The authors present these explanations not as disqualifiers but as honest boundary conditions on interpretation.

Context strengthens the new findings considerably. Previous research on neonatal sex differences in face preference is described by the team as extremely limited, with the small number of existing studies yielding mixed results, raising methodological concerns, and remaining unreplicated. The new work, with a sample of 130 neonates — large by the demanding standards of newborn research, where recruiting families within hours of birth is logistically fraught — represents one of the most rigorous attempts to date to re-evaluate the question. Conducted at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge with NHS Research Ethics Committee approval and written informed maternal consent, the study benefits from a controlled protocol, objective eye-tracking measurement, and a sample size that gives the moderate effect observed some statistical credibility.

The longer-term stakes reach into psychiatry and neurodevelopmental medicine. Conditions such as autism are diagnosed more frequently in males than females, and the reasons for that imbalance remain unresolved, spanning biological, diagnostic, and social hypotheses. If sex differences in the earliest attentional orientation toward social stimuli are genuinely present from birth, they may constitute one thread in the developmental fabric that eventually produces sex-differentiated profiles of social behaviour and vulnerability. The authors explicitly note that findings of this kind may help explain why several psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions show sex differences in prevalence — a claim offered as a research direction rather than a conclusion, and one that will require longitudinal follow-up linking newborn gaze measures to later developmental outcomes.

For now, the study’s most durable contribution is conceptual. It demonstrates that the relative allocation of attention between social and non-social visual worlds differs on average between male and female humans at the very threshold of postnatal life, while showing that neither sex looks more overall. That pattern is subtle, and the authors resist triumphalism: the effect could reflect prenatal biology, maturational differences, stimulus properties, or some combination of all three. What the study removes from the table, however, is the comfortable assumption that attentional sex differences must be products of the social environment alone. At 33 hours old, most of the social environment has not yet begun. Whatever tips these newborn girls’ eyes toward faces a little more often, it appears to have been installed before the first feed — and scientists now have a sharper, better-powered window into when and perhaps how that installation happens.

Subject of Research: Sex differences in newborn face-looking preferences and their possible prenatal origins

Article Title: Sex differences in face looking preferences at birth

Article References: Sex differences in face looking preferences at birth. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-026-00976-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13293-026-00976-9

Keywords: sex differences, newborns, face preference, eye-tracking, attention, prenatal hormones, neonatal development, social cognition, neurodevelopment, autism, infancy, Biology of Sex Differences

The starting point for the argument is a striking feature of human social life. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work on social networks shows that although people typically maintain 150 to 250 social ties, only three to five of these are genuinely close relationships, usually involving parents, children, partners, and best friends. Close relationships are qualitatively different from casual ones: they are enduring, emotionally significant bonds marked by mutual interdependence, frequent interaction, and deep cognitive and affective involvement of both self and other. Casual or instrumental ties, by contrast, are relatively transient, organized around specific goals or resources, and involve minimal emotional investment. Recent functional neuroimaging work by Roseman, Dunbar, and Arzy suggests that these two categories are handled by partly distinct neural circuitry. Thinking about close others activates the temporoparietal junction, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and default mode network A, while casual ties recruit the medial temporal lobe, retrosplenial cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and default mode network C. Remarkably, brain responses to close relationships correlated strongly with responses to small spaces such as a room or household, whereas casual ties tracked with large spaces like a town or region. Reaction times were also significantly shorter when people thought about their close people, suggesting that close relationships are processed more rapidly, with stronger self-related and intuitive components.

Yet despite this growing neuroscientific picture, Winnette identifies a conceptual gap. Attachment theory, the dominant framework for early social development, explains how infants form bonds with caregivers and build internal working models, cognitive-affective representations of self and others that guide expectations, emotion regulation, and behavior in later relationships. Object relations theory similarly proposes that early interactions are internalized as enduring mental representations that serve as road maps for social life. But neither tradition, the article argues, explicitly explains how individuals come to recognize and classify relationships as belonging to qualitatively different types, that is, how we learn that some relationships are close and others are not. The neuroscience tells us that close and casual ties involve different cognitive processes, but the developmental mechanism by which these categories are acquired has remained insufficiently understood.

The proposed solution draws on a concept from memory research: the memory schema. As defined by Ghosh and Gilboa, a memory schema is a multidimensional, dynamic body of knowledge that emerges from integrating multiple interrelated experiences. Schemas encode commonalities across episodes, enabling abstraction and generalization, while discarding the details of individual events. They are inherently associative, linking perceptual, conceptual, and contextual elements, and they can incorporate affective components so that emotions become embedded within their structure. The perspective proposes that repeated, emotionally salient interactions with primary caregivers give rise not only to specific attachment bonds but also to a generalized, domain-general memory schema of relational closeness. Through countless interactions, the infant’s memory system abstracts recurring relational features such as predictability, proximity, emotional attunement, and interactional frequency, forming a multidimensional, affectively laden template of what constitutes a close versus a casual relationship.

Crucially, the developmental timing fits what memory science now knows about infancy. Declarative episodic memory, our ability to remember specific events in rich detail, is limited early in life and improves markedly around age seven or eight, which is why adults experience infantile amnesia. Yet infants are prodigious learners of generalized knowledge. Statistical learning, the ability to detect regularities in repetitive experience, is intensely active from the earliest months, and an fMRI study by Ellis and colleagues showed that the anterior hippocampus supports statistical learning from as early as three months of age, before the trisynaptic pathway supporting episodic memory matures. Alberini and Travaglia’s model of memory development proposes that hippocampal learning proceeds through a cascade of critical periods, with generalized semantic and statistical learning preceding detailed episodic learning. In other words, the infant brain is built first to extract categories and regularities, and only later to encode specific episodes. This hierarchical principle, Winnette argues, is exactly what would be needed to construct a categorical representation of relational closeness before the child can remember any particular close moment.

The building blocks of this schema are laid down through several well-documented learning processes. Newborns arrive with implicit memories of their biological mother’s sounds, smells, and tastes acquired in utero, and can distinguish her face from a stranger’s within hours of birth. Perceptual constancy allows infants to recognize the caregiver across changing conditions, and perceptual learning then builds increasingly nuanced knowledge on top of that stable foundation. Perceptual narrowing progressively tunes infants to the faces and voices of familiar people. Memory generalization, present from birth, preserves the core meaning of experiences while their details fade, and emotionally intense experiences are preferentially retained. Nim Tottenham’s research on early adversity further suggests that medial prefrontal-subcortical circuitry encodes affective memory schemas of early caregiving, so that even without episodic memories of traumatic events, implicit schemas of hostility or coldness can shape relationships for a lifetime. The same mechanism, applied to warm and responsive care, would encode a positive template of closeness.

Interactive social learning in infancy provides the raw material. Imitation, documented in newborns by Meltzoff and Moore and debated ever since, may function not merely as a learning tool for specific behaviors but as a process through which infants extract regularities across interactions, distinguishing familiar, stable partners from less predictable others. Parent-infant synchrony, studied extensively by Ruth Feldman, involves shared affective states, temporal coordination, and biological tuning, providing a structured, emotionally rich context in which infants encode core features of closeness such as mutual regulation and shared affect. Intersubjectivity, the capacity to share another person’s lived experience described by Daniel Stern and Colwyn Trevarthen, appears to be an innate program active within the first months of life, with infant-caregiver face-to-face exchanges statistically resembling informal adult conversation. Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex, though anatomically immature, is partially active in infancy and responds preferentially to self-relevant social stimuli, including a mother’s smile, infant-directed speech, and affectionate touch, which has been shown to speed face recognition in four-month-olds.

The proposed framework thus complements rather than replaces attachment theory. Where attachment theory and object relations theory explain how individuals expect particular relationships to function, the new account explains how individuals come to organize and classify relationships more broadly, introducing cognitive-neuroscientific mechanisms of abstraction and generalization that link early repetitive interactions to the formation of relational categories. The author is careful to acknowledge limitations: the framework is conceptual rather than empirically tested, the construct of a closeness schema has not yet been operationalized, and the model may underrepresent individual differences in temperament and genetics, later-life plasticity, and the possibility that closeness exists on a continuum rather than as a categorical boundary. Future research directions include longitudinal designs, neurocognitive measures that test whether close and casual relationship stimuli differentially engage memory and affect systems, and cross-cultural studies of whether the close-casual distinction is universal.

The stakes of the proposal are considerable. Close relationships are essential for emotional well-being, and their absence or disruption is a primary determinant of loneliness, defined as a perceived discrepancy between desired and actual relational closeness. Loneliness and social isolation rank among the major issues in mental health, and research links early social learning to later relationship quality, loneliness, and social isolation. If Winnette is right, the capacity for intimacy rests on a foundation laid in the earliest weeks and months of life, when an infant’s memory system quietly distills thousands of small interactions into a single, powerful idea: that with this person, interactions are frequent, predictable, emotionally intense, and reliably the same when they return. That abstracted sense of closeness, encoded long before conscious recollection begins, may then serve as the cognitive-affective template on which every subsequent close relationship, from childhood friendships to adult partnerships, is built.

Subject of Research: The developmental emergence of a memory schema of relational closeness in infancy

Article Title: Perspective: Early Development of Memory Schema of Closeness in Social Relationships

Article References: Winnette, P. (2026). Perspective: Early Development of Memory Schema of Closeness in Social Relationships. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00538-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00538-3

Keywords: memory schema, relational closeness, attachment theory, infancy, social neuroscience, statistical learning, internal working models, primary caregiver, perceptual narrowing, imitation, intersubjectivity, loneliness