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45How attractiveness affects implicit cognition 2faces to modulate implicit attention. It is important to note that somerecent studies have questioned the evolutionary importance of facial sym,metry. For example, not all studies show that symmetry correlates withhealth (Pound et al., 2014), and symmetrical faces are more attractive evenafter removing symmetry information by showing only half of the face. Thisindicates that other factors that are correlated with symmetry may causethe high attractiveness ratings for symmetrical faces (Scheib, Gangestad, &Thornhill, 1999). Furthermore, recent data-driven approaches to facial at,tractiveness have cast doubt on the importance of symmetry (Holzleitner etal., 2019; A. Jones & Jaeger, 2019). For example, Jones and Jaeger (2019)recently studied the differential effects of facial characteristics on the per,ception of attractiveness. They concluded that symmetry of facial shape isnot informative when it comes to predicting attractiveness. Instead, theyconclude that shape averageness is a more accurate predictor of attractive,ness. Therefore, based on this perspective, we suggest that future researchmight study attentional biases towards averaged versus non-averaged faces.Our third key result, that gaze cueing was not modulated by facial at,tractiveness, was not in line with our prediction. We did find a strong cueingeffect, but this effect was seemingly unaffected by attractiveness category ofthe stimuli, as participants did not respond faster on congruent trials inthe Posner paradigm when attractive faces were displayed. Our findingscontradict previous literature describing the effect of evolutionarily relevantfacial characteristics on gaze cueing (Deaner et al., 2007; Hori et al., 2005;Ohlsen et al., 2013). Given that attractiveness is such an important crite,rion for partner choice, it is surprising that gaze cueing was not modulatedby facial attractiveness. One likely explanation is methodological: Jonesand colleagues (2010) found a significant effect of facial dominance on gazecueing when side-looking stimuli were presented for 200ms, but not whenthey were presented for 400ms or 800ms. On the contrary, in our study,we used a presentation duration of 300ms. Thus, it might be the case thatthe subtle effect of facial attractiveness on reflexive gaze following manifestsitself only at very short presentation durations. Furthermore, the currentgaze cueing paradigm allows only for indirect inference of the isolated effectof attractiveness on gaze cueing. However, this paradigm does not provideany information about how a person would behave in a situation where peo,ple varying in attractiveness look in different directions. In this scenario,would the person shift their gaze in congruence with the most attractiveperson, or not? To answer this question, we believe that an approach thatcombines the dot-probe and gaze cueing paradigm has its merits. Such aparadigm would help to further elucidate the link between attractivenessand gaze cueing.One important limitation of our study is the lack of data on motiva,tion of the participants with regard to mate searching. This could possiblyexplain the null effects that we found in Experiment 2 and 3. Previouswork has suggested that motivations might affect implicit cognition in partner choice contexts (Maner & Ackerman, 2015). Consequently, empiricalstudies have found that attentional biases for attractive faces do not alwaysgeneralize to all people. For example, attentional biases for attractive facesmight only become apparent in people with a short-term mating strategies (Maner, Gailliot, Rouby, & Miller, 2007; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall,2007) or in participants who are not in a romantic relationship (Y. Ma etal., 2015, 2019). It is theoretically possible that people who are motivatedto find a partner are more likely to show an implicit attentional bias forsymmetrical faces, for example. In line with this idea, sociosexuality predicted explicit preferences for symmetrical male faces in women (Quist etal., 2012). Therefore, we want to emphasize the need for future studiesto incorporate relationship status and measures of sociosexuality when investigating implicit cognition. The same applies to context-dependent gazecueing; while we did not find evidence that attractive opposite-sex facesenhance gaze cueing, this does not rule out such an effect in other matechoice contexts. For example, people might follow the gaze of attractivesame-sex conspecifics in a mate choice context to identify which oppositesex individuals they attend to. Such explicit mate choice copying has beendescribed for both men and women (Waynforth, 2007; Place, Todd, Penke,& Asendorpf, 2010), but future work could establish whether this generalizes to implicit gaze cueing. Thus, incorporating individual motivations andexploring different mate choice contexts might help to further elucidate theeffect of attractiveness on implicit cognition.Importantly, we found no effect of sex on bias towards attractiveness ineither of the experiments. Our findings are in line with what (Maner etal., 2003) call the opposite-sexed beauty captures the mind hypothesis, andcontrast with the one-sided gender bias hypothesis. Thus, both men andwomen in our study seemed to selectively focus on attractive opposite-sexfaces. Similarly, we found no effect of age group on attractiveness bias:participants of both reproductive and post-reproductive age had a similarbias towards attractive faces. Taken together, these results suggest thatthe effect of attractiveness on social cognition generalizes over sex and age.However, studies using a clear mate search context are necessary to confirmthese findings.In conclusion, our findings corroborate previous research on attractiveness bias by showing an implicit attentional bias towards attractive faces,likely reflecting an attention capture effect, in a Western sample with awide age range. Thereby, our results demonstrate how facial attractiveness,a characteristic that is highly relevant from an evolutionary perspective,affects implicit social cognition. However, we did not find an effect of attractiveness on gaze cueing. Nevertheless, we believe that incorporatingindividual motivations and applying more ecologically valid paradigms canhelp to further elucidate the link between attractiveness and gaze cueing.Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 45 08-04-2024 16:35