Anecdotes not being evidence and all I do have to say that my boyfriend does not like spiders and freaks at the larger ones while I have been wanting one as a pet for awhile now.

I'll have to stick it out with my snakes though, he likes the snakes. Absolutely refuses to let me keep arachnids of any sort though.

When(if) I get a desk job I'm buying a little scorpion or tarantula to be my desk buddy.

If they had, say, shown the baby girls spider pics and then scared them with a loud noise, and found that they learned to be scared of the spider pics faster than boys, that would support their hypothesis.

Obviously it would be unethical to actually do that. But not unscientific.

However this particular experiment is rubbish, the results don't really mean anything since assuming that babies can get "confused" is very dubious.

*goes off to play with scorpions and spiders*

I love spiders, and have done since I was little. So do the rest of my family.

Even at a few weeks old, is it possible, even likely (if there were an outright fear response- ie screaming like a tiny banshee) that some girl babies had already had a chance to model off Mom reacting to a "creepy crawly".

MY mom is a woodsy girl, growing up in a wooded area, my sister & i often played with toads, frogs, SNAKES, bugs of all sorts…
Sis even got a PET snake in college, and mom responded with "COOL."

Currently, I find I prefer things like bugs to say outside, and if I can't escort an intruder to the outdoors, I fetch my bug-eating cat.

Sample size of 10 is Waaaay to small to mean Anything. And was anything done to disguise gender of child, or to keep researcher reactions from being observed?
(Baby= information sponge)

Depending on your definition of cool of course

Which reminds me, here:
http://www.lablit.com/article/537 is a wee video of the fringe event the night before the conference.