“Parental” responses to human infants (and puppy dogs): Evidence that the perception of eyes is especially influential, but eye contact is not
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present investigation tests: (i) whether the perception of an human infant's eyes, relative to other facial features, especially strongly elicits "parental" responses (e.g., appraisals of cuteness and vulnerability); (ii) if, so, whether effects of the visual perception of eyes may be partially attributable to eye contact; (iii) whether the perception of non-human animals' (puppy dogs') eyes also especially strongly influence appraisals of their cuteness and vulnerability; and (iv) whether individual differences in caregiving motives moderate effects. Results from 5 experiments (total N = 1458 parents and non-parents) provided empirical evidence to evaluate these hypotheses: Appraisals of human infants were influenced especially strongly by the visual perception of human infants' eyes (compared to other facial features); these effects do not appear to be attributable to eye contact; the visual perception of eyes influenced appraisals of puppy dogs, but not exactly in the same way that it influenced appraisals of human infants; and there was no consistent evidence of moderation by individual differences in caregiving motives. These results make novel contributions to several psychological literatures, including literatures on the motivational psychology of parental care and on person perception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".