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Individual attractiveness preferences predict attention995IntroductionPhysical attractiveness permeates important aspects of human interaction and 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 better in the labor market (Maestripieri et al., 2017; Nault et al., 2020). In addition, physical attractiveness has an important influence on mate choice, and its weight in shaping mate choice has important effects in fundamental aspects of our psychology, such as attention. For example, previous research has shown that people’s attention is drawn faster and for a 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 in a wide variety of distinct approaches that may capture only some of said complexity. For example, human mate choice has been studied by focusing on cognitive processes (Maner & Ackerman, 2015; Roth et al., 2022; Todd et al., 2007), attractiveness ratings (Asendorpf et al., 2011; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021), and real-life interactions (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Perilloux et al., 2012; Prochazkova et al., 2022). Even though previous studies have integrated multiple methods to investigate mate choice, no previous study has examined the influence of attractiveness on visual attention and linked this to decisions in a realistic mate choice context. Given the context-sensitivity of cognitive processes (Kenrick et al., 2010), we explore how individual 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 tasks and a speed-date paradigm to examine whether and how these different approaches to studying human mate choice concord.Physical attractiveness is strongly associated with attraction to a mate (Luo & Zhang, 2009; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021), and both women and men mention physical attractiveness as an important criterion for mate selection (Buss & Barnes, 1986; Rhodes, 2006). Consequently, physically attractive people have more sexual partners (Karraker et al., 2017) and a higher reproductive success (Jokela, 2009). From an evolutionary perspective, attractiveness has been proposed to be a cue of genetic quality in terms of health or fertility: by selecting an attractive partner, one can increase the likelihood of bearing offspring with high genetic quality Tom Roth.indd 99 08-01-2024 10:41