The waist‐to‐hip ratio (WHR) is correlated with health and associated with sex, attractiveness, and age judgments by adults. We examined the development of sensitivity to the WHR by testing 3.5‐month‐old infants' (N = 71) preference between images depicting different WHRs. Female 3.5‐month‐olds exhibited a preference for the WHR associated with attractiveness and mate value by adults (0.7) over a larger WHR (0.9). This preference was exhibited when infants were tested on upright stimuli but not when they were tested on inverted stimuli, indicating that low‐level differences (e.g., curviness) were not driving performance. This sensitivity to WHR may lay the foundation for more explicit preferences and categorical associations later in life. In contrast to females, male infants failed to exhibit a significant preference for the 0.7 WHR in either orientation, replicating previous findings of female infants' superior processing of social stimuli. Implications for theories of the development of body knowledge and sex differences in social information processing are discussed.

中文翻译：

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婴儿早期的腰臀比敏感性

腰臀比 (WHR) 与健康相关，并与成年人的性别、吸引力和年龄判断有关。我们通过测试 3.5 个月大的婴儿（N= 71) 描述不同 WHR 的图像之间的偏好。与较大的 WHR (0.9) 相比，3.5 个月大的女性更喜欢与吸引力和配偶价值相关的 WHR (0.7)。当婴儿在直立刺激下测试时表现出这种偏好，但在倒置刺激下测试时则没有，这表明低水平的差异（例如，曲线）不是驱动性能的。这种对腰臀比的敏感性可能为以后生活中更明确的偏好和分类关联奠定基础。与女性相比，男性婴儿在任一方向都没有表现出对 0.7 腰臀比的显着偏好，这与之前关于女性婴儿对社会刺激的卓越处理的发现一致。