Newborn girls and boys show different attention patterns within hours of birth

Newborn girls and boys show different attention patterns within hours of birth medicalxpress.com

Cambridge scientists have shown that girls and boys differ in what they pay attention to, even at birth. Since these differences are present so early, it is possible they emerge due to prenatal factors. The findings…

18 points•theanonymousone•8 days ago•7 comments•

#attention #boys #birth #girls #newborn #different #patterns #within

7 comments

MarkusWandel8 days ago

Only a quick skim, and - hey I'm in Canada, so I can still talk about gender issues, right? What about "born into the wrong body" types? Who always felt they belong in the other gender and eventually transition? I guess it would be hard to test at scale, but would they at birth already exhibit the "other gender" behaviour patterns?

erentz8 days ago

The differences observed are at the population level. That means there is HUGE overlap between the two populations and you can’t distinguish any data point as being a girl or a boy. Only that the populations have a different average or range. For a visual representation check out [1].

This kind of thing shows up all over the place in all fields of research. It’s why for example although you can see immune system differences at a population level between patients with disease X and healthy controls, you can’t in any way use it as a biomarker for an individual who might have disease X.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13293-026-00976-9...

nsvd28 days ago

This would be incredibly hard to test because you'd have to have the results of the study and then wait a few decades to see who ends up identifying as transgender. Also the amount of transgender people is a small fraction of the population so you'd need a larger total sample size for the same statistical significance.

My experience interacting with transgender people is that transgender men and cisgender women have a lot of things in common and visa versa, so I would expect this to follow that pattern, but it would be interesting to see it studied.

BoxwoodSeed8 days ago

Quite obviously? Male and females are differently wired, so to speak. A Norwegian comedian did an entire documentary about it back in 2010 [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWHTKnB0jqZD9cR0zMpNL...

stronglikedan8 days ago

You'd think it would be obvious, but we're in a post-truth society at the moment, so it just depends on who you ask.

Avshalom8 days ago

Method here is a little iffy I gotta say. They had people just watch video and judge which direction the baby was looking, then average the closest two.

also the total difference is like a second and a half out of 70.

also also a parent had to hold the child which introduces a mechanism of biasing.

HelloUsername8 days ago

Sorry. What?

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

7 comments

Related stories