Girls prefer dolls, boys prefer trucks

A U.S. study of babies 3 months to 8 months suggests girls prefer dolls and boys prefer trucks, researchers said.

Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, says the study used technology to track the eye movements of 30 infants in car seats as they watched a puppet theater-styled box.

The researchers used visual tracking monitors to measure how long the infants fixated their attention on particular toys during two 10-second intervals.

The study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, finds during two 10-second intervals, the girls favored dolls, boys favored the toy trucks.

The existence of these innate preferences for object features coupled with well-documented social influences may explain why toy preferences are one of the earliest known manifestations of sex-linked social behavior, Alexander says in a statement.