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Chapter 5100(Rhodes, 2006; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Some studies indeed suggest that attractiveness is positively correlated with health (Mengelkoch et al., 2022; Nedelec & Beaver, 2014), although this has been heavily debated (Cai et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2021; Pátková et al., 2022). Accordingly, people rate attractive faces as healthier than unattractive faces (Rhodes et al., 2007), although this could be the result of a general halo effect for attractive people (Dion et al., 1972; Kalick et al., 1998). Altogether, by selecting an attractive 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 to identify, and feel attracted to, physically attractive mates. Some of these mechanisms may be understood as perceptual biases, previously termed sexually selective cognition (Maner & Ackerman, 2015). These biases have been shown to interact with different cognitive processes. For example, men and women will exert more effort to see pictures of attractive than unattractive opposite-sex stimuli (Hayden et al., 2007), although this opposite-sex bias is especially strong in men (Levy et al., 2008). When it comes to recognition memory, people seem to specifically remember attractive faces (Lin et al., 2020; Marzi & Viggiano, 2010). Importantly, this memory bias seems to be strongest for young participants, who are at the age where they are most likely to start getting involved in romantic interactions (Lin et al., 2020). These examples show how attractiveness can modulate human cognition.Apart from effort and memory biases, the majority of experimental studies on cognition and mate choice have focused on processes of visual attention. Several studies show attentional biases towards physically attractive faces: they are attended to first and hold our attention for a longer time (Lindell & Lindell, 2014). Physically attractive faces are also preferentially attended to in preferential looking paradigms (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2018). When it comes to immediate attention, previous work has shown that people identify faces that were previously rated as attractive extremely quickly. For example, when presented with two pictures at the same time for 100 ms, participants could select the most attractive picture above chance level (Guo et al., 2011). In addition, using a dot-probe paradigm with a slightly longer time scale of 300 ms, Roth et al. (2022) demonstrated that participants showed an attentional bias towards attractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces, but not towards unattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces. However, it Tom Roth.indd 100 08-01-2024 10:41