
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993                   TAG: 9306200095
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

DADS KNOW BABIES BY TOUCH, STUDY FINDS

Here's surprising news for Father's Day: A new study finds that most fathers can recognize their newborn babies just by stroking the backs of the infants' hands.

About 61 percent of blindfolded dads chose correctly from a group of three babies, much better than the 33 percent one would expect from pure guessing.

Similar results for mothers were reported last year. But the mothers were also shown to recognize their infants by stroking the cheek, whereas fathers in the new study could not, researchers said.

The difference may arise because fathers tend to touch their infants' faces far less than mothers do but frequently touch hands during play, said psychologist Marsha Kaitz.

Kaitz, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, did the work with colleagues there and at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The study has been accepted for publication in the international journal Infant Behavior and Development, she said in a telephone interview.

Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami, said it made sense that fathers shared recognition ability with mothers. But the fact that they showed it with an average of only 6.8 hours of prior direct exposure to the child is "pretty amazing," she said.

The study included 23 middle-class Israeli fathers. The recognition ability appeared in men from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and Kaitz said she believed the same results would occur with fathers from the United States.

The average age of participants was 30, and half were first-time dads. The babies were, on average, 69 hours old at the time of the test.

Participants were drawn from fathers visiting in a maternity ward.

The fathers generally said they relied on texture or gut feeling to identify their infants, but Kaitz said those descriptions may not be reliable because people are not used to describing experiences of touch.

The true answer is probably some combination of such things as skin temperature, creases and the amount of fatty tissue under the skin, she said.

by CNB