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49How attractiveness preferences influence attention3AbstractPhysical attractiveness plays a crucial role in mate choice for both men andwomen. This is reflected in visual attention: people immediately attend to,wards and look longer at attractive faces, especially when they are motivatedto find a partner. However, previous studies did not incorporate real-life dat,ing decisions. Here, we aimed to combine attentional tasks with individualattractiveness ratings and a real-life mate choice context, namely a speed,dating paradigm. We investigated whether heterosexual single young adultsshowed biases in immediate and voluntary attention towards attractive facesand preferred dating partners. In line with previous research, we found con,siderable individual differences in individual attractiveness preferences. Fur,thermore, our results showed that men had a bias towards attractive facesand preferred dating partners in the immediate attention task, while resultsfor women were mixed. In the voluntary attention task, however, both menand women had an attentional bias towards attractive faces and preferreddating partners. Our results suggest that individual attractiveness prefer,ences are good predictors of especially voluntary attention. We discuss thesefindings from an evolutionary perspective and suggest directions for futureresearch.Based on:Roth, T. S., Samara, I., Juan Perea Garcia, & Kret, M. E. (in press). In,dividual attractiveness preferences differentially modulate immediate andvoluntary attention. Scientific Reports.All data, code, and materials that are associated with this paper and usedto conduct the analyses are accessible on the Leiden University archivingplatform DataverseNL.IntroductionPhysical attractiveness permeates important aspects of human interactionand shapes our judgements about people. Previous research shows that people associate positive personality traits with attractive people (Dion et al.,1972; Griffin & Langlois, 2006), consider them more cooperative (Andreoni& Petrie, 2008), and attractive people have even been shown to fare betterin the labor market (Maestripieri, Henry, & Nickels, 2017; Nault, Pitesa, &Thau, 2020). In addition, physical attractiveness has an important influence on mate choice, and its weight in shaping mate choice has importanteffects in fundamental aspects of our psychology, such as attention. For example, previous research has shown that people’s attention is drawn fasterand for longer duration to attractive stimuli (Leder et al., 2016; Lindell &Lindell, 2014). However, given that human mate choice is such a fundamentally complex and multifaceted phenomenon, researchers have treated it ina wide variety of distinct approaches that may capture only some of saidcomplexity. For example, human mate choice has been studied by focusingon cognitive processes (Maner & Ackerman, 2015; Roth, Du, Samara, &Kret, 2022; Todd, Penke, Fasolo, & Lenton, 2007), attractiveness ratings(Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021a; Asendorpf et al., 2011), and real-life interactions (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008a; Perilloux et al., 2012; Prochazkova etal., 2022). Even though previous studies have integrated multiple methodsto investigate mate choice, no previous study has examined the influence ofattractiveness on visual attention and linked this to decisions in a realisticmate choice context. Given the context-sensitivity of cognitive processes(Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, 2010), we explore howindividual attractiveness preferences and partner preferences shape our immediate and voluntary attention using a novel setting. Specifically, here,we combine well-established cognitive tasks with attractiveness rating tasksand a speed-date paradigm to examine whether and how these differentapproaches to studying human mate choice concord.Physical attractiveness is strongly associated with attraction to a mate(Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021a; Luo & Zhang, 2009), and both women andmen mention physical attractiveness as an important criterion for mate selection (Buss & Barnes, 1986; Rhodes, 2006). Furthermore, physically attractive people have more sexual partners (Karraker et al., 2017) and ahigher reproductive success (Jokela, 2009). From an evolutionary perspective, attractiveness has been proposed to be a cue of genetic quality in termsof health or fertility: by selecting an attractive partner, one can increasethe likelihood of bearing offspring with high genetic quality (Rhodes, 2006;Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Some studies indeed suggest that attractiveness is positively correlated with health (Mengelkoch, Gassen, Prokosch,Boehm, & Hill, 2022; Nedelec & Beaver, 2014), although this has been heavily debated (Cai et al., 2019; B. C. Jones, Holzleitner, & Shiramizu, 2021;Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 49 08-04-2024 16:35