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51How attractiveness preferences influence attention3Pátková et al., 2022). Accordingly, people rate attractive faces as health,ier than unattractive faces (Rhodes et al., 2007), although this could bethe result of a general halo effect for attractive people (Dion et al., 1972;Kalick, Zebrowitz, Langlois, & Johnson, 1998). Altogether, by selecting anattractive mate, humans might confer their offspring a selective advantage,thereby increasing their reproductive success.If selecting a physically attractive mate indeed results in greater fitness,this may be reflected in specific cognitive mechanisms that help people toidentify, and feel attracted to, physically attractive mates. Some of thesemechanisms may be understood as perceptual biases, previously termed sex,ually selective cognition (Maner & Ackerman, 2015). These biases have beenshown to interact with different cognitive processes. For example, men andwomen will exert more effort to see pictures of attractive than unattrac,tive opposite-sex stimuli (Hayden, Parikh, Deaner, & Platt, 2007), althoughthis opposite-sex bias is especially strong in men (Levy et al., 2008). Whenit comes to recognition memory, people seem to specifically remember at,tractive faces (Lin et al., 2020; Marzi & Viggiano, 2010). Importantly, thismemory bias seems to be strongest for young participants, who are at the agewhere they are most likely to start getting involved in romantic interactions(Lin et al., 2020). These examples show how attractiveness can modulatehuman cognition.Apart from effort and memory biases, the majority of experimental stud,ies on cognition and mate choice have focused on processes of visual atten,tion. Several studies show attentional biases towards physically attractivefaces: they are attended to first and hold our attention for a longer time(Lindell & Lindell, 2014). Physically attractive faces are also preferentiallyattended to in preferential looking paradigms (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic,Goller, Tinio, & Leder, 2018). When it comes to immediate attention, previ,ous work has shown that people identify faces that were previously rated asattractive extremely quickly. For example, when presented with two picturesat the same time for 100ms, participants could select the most attractive pic,ture above chance level (Guo, Liu, & Roebuck, 2011). In addition, using adot-probe paradigm with a slightly longer time scale of 300ms Roth et al.(2022) demonstrated that participants showed an attentional bias towardsattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces, but not towardsunattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces. However, itshould be noted that attractiveness categories were predefined by a differentparticipant sample in this study (D. S. Ma et al., 2015).Such an approach is typical in studies investigating attractiveness, wheretraditionally researchers have focused on average ratings of general attrac,tiveness. This approach is based on the notion that people strongly agreeon which features and characteristics are attractive (Langlois et al., 2000).However, recent research has emphasized that it is important to disentan,gle shared and idiosyncratic contributions to judgments (Martinez, Funk,Pátková et al., 2022). Accordingly, people rate attractive faces as health,ier than unattractive faces (Rhodes et al., 2007), although this could bethe result of a general halo effect for attractive people (Dion et al., 1972;Kalick, Zebrowitz, Langlois, & Johnson, 1998). Altogether, by selecting anattractive mate, humans might confer their offspring a selective advantage,thereby increasing their reproductive success.If selecting a physically attractive mate indeed results in greater fitness,this may be reflected in specific cognitive mechanisms that help people toidentify, and feel attracted to, physically attractive mates. Some of thesemechanisms may be understood as perceptual biases, previously termed sex,ually selective cognition (Maner & Ackerman, 2015). These biases have beenshown to interact with different cognitive processes. For example, men andwomen will exert more effort to see pictures of attractive than unattrac,tive opposite-sex stimuli (Hayden, Parikh, Deaner, & Platt, 2007), althoughthis opposite-sex bias is especially strong in men (Levy et al., 2008). Whenit comes to recognition memory, people seem to specifically remember at,tractive faces (Lin et al., 2020; Marzi & Viggiano, 2010). Importantly, thismemory bias seems to be strongest for young participants, who are at the agewhere they are most likely to start getting involved in romantic interactions(Lin et al., 2020). These examples show how attractiveness can modulatehuman cognition.Apart from effort and memory biases, the majority of experimental stud,ies on cognition and mate choice have focused on processes of visual atten,tion. Several studies show attentional biases towards physically attractivefaces: they are attended to first and hold our attention for a longer time(Lindell & Lindell, 2014). Physically attractive faces are also preferentiallyattended to in preferential looking paradigms (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic,Goller, Tinio, & Leder, 2018). When it comes to immediate attention, previ,ous work has shown that people identify faces that were previously rated asattractive extremely quickly. For example, when presented with two picturesat the same time for 100ms, participants could select the most attractive pic,ture above chance level (Guo, Liu, & Roebuck, 2011). In addition, using adot-probe paradigm with a slightly longer time scale of 300ms Roth et al.(2022) demonstrated that participants showed an attentional bias towardsattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces, but not towardsunattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces. However, itshould be noted that attractiveness categories were predefined by a differentparticipant sample in this study (D. S. Ma et al., 2015).Such an approach is typical in studies investigating attractiveness, wheretraditionally researchers have focused on average ratings of general attrac,tiveness. This approach is based on the notion that people strongly agreeon which features and characteristics are attractive (Langlois et al., 2000).However, recent research has emphasized that it is important to disentan,gle shared and idiosyncratic contributions to judgments (Martinez, Funk,& Todorov, 2020) because ample evidence shows that beauty is – at leastpartly – in the eye of the beholder, as agreement on attractiveness is about50 percent (Hönekopp, 2006; Bronstad & Russell, 2007). Importantly, suchindividual preferences can also influence date success, i.e. willingness tomeet again after a first date (Baxter et al., 2022). These inter-individualvariations are possibly the result of differences in environments (Germineet al., 2015), such as culture (Zhan et al., 2021) and close social relationships (Bronstad & Russell, 2007). Nevertheless, most traditional laboratorystudies did not take idiosyncratic preferences of participants into account,even though there can be considerable inter-individual variation in perceiving attractiveness. Taking these individual differences into considerationmight reveal more pronounced effects of attractiveness on cognition. Thus,in the present study, we aimed to examine whether and the manner in whichidiosyncratic attractiveness preferences influence immediate attention.When it comes to voluntary attention, that is, where attention is allocated when able to do so freely, multiple studies have found that participants focus their attention on their sex of interest, or on the most attractive person of their sex of interest, depending on the design. For instance,Dawson & Chivers (2016, 2018) presented sexually explicit stimuli to participants that contained same-sex or opposite-sex people and found thatheterosexual participants fixated more on the opposite-sex stimuli. Mitrovic and colleagues (2016) extended these findings by presenting same-sexand opposite-sex stimuli varying in attractiveness to heterosexual and homosexual participants. They found that participants attended most to theattractive faces corresponding to their sexual preference. Follow-up studiesmodified this paradigm by using the participants’ own attractiveness ratingsof the stimuli, instead of predefining stimuli as attractive or unattractive,and yielded similar results: people spent more time looking at faces that theyfound attractive (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2018). Thus, a plethoraof studies shows that people selectively attend to the more attractive facethey are presented with.Cognition can be substantially influenced by top-down processes (Kenrick et al., 2010; Schaller, Kenrick, Neel, & Neuberg, 2017), and attentionalbiases related to mate choice are no exception to this. More specifically, mating motivations seem to modulate attentional processing of attractiveness.For example, Ma and colleagues (2015, 2019) used a dot-probe paradigmwith 500 ms presentation duration to study whether immediate attentionwas modulated by attractiveness and relationship status. They found thatsingle participants’ attention was captured by attractive faces the most, andthat these same participants had trouble disengaging from attractive facialstimuli. When it comes to voluntary attention, similar results have beenfound: single participants showed a stronger positive correlation betweenperceived physical attractiveness and attention than committed participants(Mitrovic et al., 2018). This suggests that the bias towards physical attracIliana Samara 17x24.indd 51 08-04-2024 16:35