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69How attractiveness preferences influence attention3et al., 2017). Regarding the effect of attractiveness on immediate attention,this effect is comparable to a previous study that did not take idiosyncraticpreferences into account (Roth et al., 2022). In that study, people had anattentional bias of 9 ms to attractive faces when paired with neutral faces,but had a 6 ms attentional bias to neutral faces when these were pairedwith unattractive faces. Overall, this indirectly translates to an 15 ms at,tentional bias to attractive faces compared with unattractive faces. While itis important to note that this is an indirect comparison, and that the meth,ods are slightly different, this effect size fits well with our current finding.In conclusion, contrary to our expectation, taking idiosyncratic preferencesinto account did not increase the magnitude of previously recorded effectsof attractiveness on immediate attention. Instead, the size of the effect ofconsensus ratings and idiosyncratic ratings on immediate attention seem tobe rather similar.Our hypothesis regarding date outcome and immediate attention werepartly supported. Specifically, we found an overall effect of the distractorpicture on RT, and an effect of the probe picture for men but not for women.For men, these results are in line with our previously described effects ofattractiveness on immediate attention. Given that we found a robust asso,ciation between attractiveness and immediate attention for men, and thatwe know that date outcome is strongly associated with attractiveness (Roth,Samara, & Kret, 2021a; Luo & Zhang, 2009), it is not surprising that dateoutcome and immediate attention are associated as well. Of course, phys,ical attractiveness rating does not perfectly predict date outcome; otherprocesses such as physiological linkage (Prochazkova et al., 2022), nonver,bal behavior (Hall, Xing, & Brooks, 2015), attachment styles (Schindler,Fagundes, & Murdock, 2010) and perceived similarity (Tidwell, Eastwick,& Finkel, 2013) all explain date outcome to some extent as well. Still, theassociation between attractiveness rating and date outcome might have beenstrong enough to explain the association between date outcome and RT inthe immediate attention task.In the preferential looking task, we found that both men and womendivided their attention based on the attractiveness of the stimuli they werepresented with. This is in line with previous work (Leder et al., 2016), butalso contrasts with other work that found a gender difference, with menshowing a stronger association between voluntary attention and attractive,ness than women (Mitrovic et al., 2018). However, it is important to notethat participants in our study were all interested in a relationship, i.e., theywere motivated to find a partner, while other studies tested both single andcommitted participants (Mitrovic et al., 2018). As has been suggested, mo,tives can substantially affect cognitive processes (Kenrick et al., 2010). Ontop of that, participants in our study were aware that they would later meetthe people they saw during the tasks, possibly strengthening their motiva,tion even further.The preferential looking task consisted of trials with a prolonged exposure to the stimuli compared to the dot-probe task. Therefore, participantswere able to freely look upon the stimuli and gather more relevant information from the stimuli compared to the dot-probe task. Given that womenmight need more contextual information in order to appraise a potentialpartner (Laan & Janssen, 2007), this could possibly also explain why wedo not find a ny s ex d ifferences in th e pr eferential lo oking ta sk, wh ile wedo find some evidence for sex differences in the dot-probe ta sk. Future research should further investigate the concordance between immediate andvoluntary attention to attractiveness and their relationship to gender.We also found that date outcome was substantially associated with voluntary attention: Participants indicated that they wanted to date againwith people that they looked at for longer during the preferential lookingtask. This again highlights the strong association between attractivenessratings and initial partner preferences: especially on first dates people seemto employ physical attractiveness as their main selection criterion (Rothet al., 2022; Luo & Zhang, 2009). Given the strong association betweenattractiveness rating and voluntary attention, it is not surprising that theassociation between date outcome and voluntary attention is also robust.An exploratory analysis showed that the associations were not modulatedby gender: both men and women showed highly similar trajectories withregard to attractiveness-contingent voluntary attention. Importantly, weconsider it unlikely that this effect is driven by uncertainty in the parameter estimates, given that the credible intervals for the interactions betweenattractiveness rating and gender were very narrow (see Figure 3). Despitethe fact that this finding is somewhat inconsistent with evolutionary theories of human mate choice that emphasize sex differences i n attractivenessappraisal (Buss & Barnes, 1986; N. P. Li & Meltzer, 2015), it is in linewith previous speed-dating studies that failed to find g ender d ifferences inthe appreciation of physical attractiveness (Roth et al., 2022; Eastwick &Finkel, 2008a; Luo & Zhang, 2009). Here, we have extended these findingsby showing that both attractiveness ratings and date outcome are associated with voluntary visual attention in both men and women. Nonetheless,it should be noted that these analyses were exploratory in nature, and thusno strict inference can be drawn.One could argue that it is not readily clear whether our findings (bothin immediate and voluntary attention tasks) reflect long-term or short-termmate choice dynamics. Previous studies have questioned the ecological validity of speed-date paradigms to capture long-term mate choice processes(N. P. Li & Meltzer, 2015; N. P. Li et al., 2013). Specifically, Li et al.(2013) argue that speed-date designs might attract people that are notnecessarily considering their interaction partners as long-term mates.Thus, they posit that the unique effects o f s hort-term a nd l ong-term matechoice cannot be disentangled in speed-date designs, and that it is unclearIliana Samara 17x24.indd 69 08-04-2024 16:35