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Individual attractiveness preferences predict attention1235this is often specifically mentioned as a criterium for short-term mates (Li et al., 2013). Furthermore, previous work has shown that long-term partner ratings and physical attractiveness ratings highly correlate (Bressan, 2021; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021; Wu et al., 2022). In addition, it remains to be established whether there are specific contexts that emphasize long-term over short-term mate-choice considerations. In fact, a large-scale study showed no evidence that different initial meeting contexts (e.g., bars, church, online) influence divorce rates (Cacioppo et al., 2013). In a speed-date context, it has been shown that first impressions, which are asserted by some to reflect short-term mate choice processes, still predict long-term romantic interest (Baxter et al., 2022). In conclusion, our findings should not be interpreted as the product of uniquely long- or short-term mate choice processes. Instead, our findings would be best interpreted in the context of a close-relationships tradition (Eastwick et al., 2014) that considers short-term and long-term contexts as closely related.Finally, we attempted to disentangle the effects of attractiveness and date outcome on immediate and voluntary attention by means of Bayesian model comparisons (PSIS-LOO-CV: Vehtari et al., 2017). For immediate attention, these comparisons suggest that pre-date ratings of attractiveness are more predictive of reaction times than date outcome or post-date attractiveness, even though the differences were not robust. Thus, we cannot draw strict conclusions regarding the relative influence of attractiveness and date outcome on immediate attention. For voluntary attention, on the other hand, we found robust evidence in favor of the model that includes pre-date attractiveness ratings over the models that include date outcome and post-date attractiveness rating, respectively. This suggests that voluntary attention is specifically driven by physical attractiveness ratings, which is in line with previous work (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2016, 2018). Consequently, the robust effect of date outcome on voluntary attention might have been the result of strong intercorrelation between attractiveness ratings and date outcome, as has been reported in many studies (Luo & Zhang, 2009; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021). To address this limitation, we suggest that future studies could employ a pre-post-design, where participants engage in attention tasks before and after a speed-date session to study specifically how the experiences gained during the speed-dates alter attentional processes.Here, we investigated how attractiveness and date outcome were associated with immediate and voluntary attention in non-committed young adults. In line with previous studies, we found substantial inter-individual differences in Tom Roth.indd 123 08-01-2024 10:41