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22Chapter 2AbstractAttractiveness is an important aspect of human society. Attractive peopleenjoy multiple societal privileges and are assigned positive personality traits,and both men and women find attractiveness important when it comes topartner choice. Our universal preference for beauty might be reflected inimplicit perception of human faces. In a series of three studies, we useBayesian methods to investigate whether attractiveness or attractive traitsmodulate implicit attention and gaze cueing in a large community sample.In Experiment 1, we used a dot-probe task to measure attentional bias towards attractive faces. The results demonstrate that participants reactedfaster when the probe appeared behind an attractive face but not when itappeared behind an unattractive face, suggesting that specifically attractive faces captured attention. In Experiment 2, we used a similar method totest whether facial symmetry, an often-mentioned characteristic of attractivefaces, modulated attention. However, we found no such effect. In Experiment 3, we used a gaze-cuing task to test whether participants were morelikely to follow the gaze of attractive faces, but no such effect was found. Toconclude, attractiveness affects our implicit attention toward faces, but thisdoes not seem to extend to gaze cueing.Based on:Roth, T. S., Du, X., Samara, I., & Kret, M. E. (2021). Attractiveness modulates attention but does not enhance gaze cueing. Evolutionary BehavioralSciences. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000265Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 22 08-04-2024 16:34