Parental resemblance in 1-year-olds and the Gaussian curve

Do infants look more like their fathers or their mothers? The available data are contradictory, but were collected through different procedures: either by asking judges to identify the parent in a triplet of adults (straight guess) or by asking them to rate resemblance on a scale and then recoding highest ratings to parents as correct guesses (guess from rating). Here, we used both procedures and compared their results. Eighty judges were asked, first, to estimate the facial resemblance of 40 one-year-olds to each of three adults, and then to guess which adult in each triplet was the parent. Accuracy was better than chance with both methods, but performance in the guessing task was significantly higher. Judgments of parental resemblance were distributed normally, with a few infants preferentially resembling one parent (father or mother with equal probability), and most resembling father and mother to approximately the same degree. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.