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General discussion2019was drawn to attractive but away from unattractive faces. In Experiment 2, I presented participants with faces that varied in symmetry, a trait often considered to be correlated with facial attractiveness. Contrary to our expectations, I found no robust effect of facial symmetry on implicit attention. In Experiment 3, I employed a gaze-cueing paradigm (Deaner et al., 2007) to investigate whether participants would more readily follow the gaze of attractive faces. While I found a strong gaze cueing effect, this effect did not vary according to attractiveness category. Furthermore, I found no evidence of age or sex effects in either of the experiments. The findings presented in this chapter suggest that implicit attention but not gaze cueing is modulated by attractiveness. In addition, this attentional bias was present across age groups, and in both male and female participants. Previous studies on implicit attention have incorporated only attractive and intermediately attractive stimuli, and could not therefore investigate the differential effects of attractive and unattractive stimuli on implicit attention. Our findings showed that attention was specifically drawn to attractive faces but not to unattractive faces. This suggests that the attentional bias is not solely driven by the deviation of attractive faces from the average face, as unattractive faces also deviate from the average face but do not receive preferential attention.In Chapter 4, I defined attractiveness categories based on previous ratings by an independent group of raters. Although humans strongly agree on attractiveness ratings (Langlois et al., 2000), 50% of the variation can be explained by individual preferences (e.g., Hönekopp, 2006). Therefore, Chapter 5 examined the relationship between idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences and visual attention in a realistic mate choice context. I combined visual attractiveness rating tasks with two well-established attentional paradigms: a dot-probe paradigm to investigate immediate attention, and a preferential looking paradigm to investigate voluntary attention. Furthermore, all participants went on speed dates after completing the tasks. In line with previous studies, I found considerable inter-rater variability in the attractiveness ratings. With regard to immediate attention, idiosyncratic ratings of visual attractiveness were a good predictor of immediate attention in males, but not in females (N = 57 participants), although I found no robust sex effect. However, both male and female participants (N = 35 participants) showed a strong bias towards attractive faces in the preferential looking paradigm. Moreover, I found no consistent relationship between speed date outcome and immediate attention (N = 56 participants), whereas I found a robust association between speed-date outcome and voluntary attention for Tom Roth.indd 201 08-01-2024 10:42