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Chapter 5102Cognition can be substantially influenced by top-down processes (Kenrick et al., 2010, 2010), and attentional biases related to mate choice are no exception to this. More specifically, mating motivations seem to modulate attentional processing of attractiveness. For example, Y. Ma et al. (2015, 2019) used a dotprobe paradigm with 500 ms presentation duration to study whether immediate attention was modulated by attractiveness and relationship status. They found that non-committed participants’ attention was captured by attractive faces the most, and that these same participants had trouble disengaging from attractive facial stimuli. When it comes to voluntary attention, similar results have been found: non-committed participants showed a stronger positive correlation between perceived physical attractiveness and attention than committed participants (Mitrovic et al., 2018). This suggests that the bias towards physical attractiveness is especially pronounced when it is adaptive, i.e., for people that might be looking for a partner.It has been suggested that men are more attuned to physical attractiveness than women (Buss, 1989). This has been supported by questionnaire studies, where women seem to place less emphasis on physical attraction of their partner than men do (Bech-Sørensen & Pollet, 2016). This is also reflected in cognition: men show a stronger correlation between stimulus attractiveness and preferential looking (Mitrovic et al., 2018). Similar patterns have been found in immediate attention studies (Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007; Zhang et al., 2017), although this finding is not always replicated (Roth et al., 2022). However, these sex differences do not always become apparent in studies that investigate reallife interactions. On the contrary, both women and men seem to rely mostly on physical attractiveness of their partners to make mate choice decisions during speed-dates (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Luo & Zhang, 2009; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021). Thus, while some studies report sex differences in attractiveness bias in attentional paradigms, these differences do not seem to be reflected in dating decisions. This raises the question whether these different approaches to studying mate choice capture the same processes and to what extent they are actually informative with regard to real-life mate choice.Here, we therefore combined two paradigms that have been used frequently to study immediate and voluntary attention in the context of human mate choice with a realistic paradigm to study human mate choice, namely speeddating. More specifically, we investigated the association between individual preferences for attractiveness and date outcome, respectively, on immediate Tom Roth.indd 102 08-01-2024 10:41