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Chapter 9206Figure 1. Schematic depiction of the updated two-stage modal of human mate choice. The model still consists of two stages. However, stage two now consists of two separate filters. Furthermore, the model explicitly mentions trade-offs between different filters, allowing for a high ‘score’ on one filter to compensate for a lower ‘score’ on another.The link between cognitive bias and behaviourIn addition, the results from Chapter 4 cast doubt on the link between attractive traits and immediate attentional biases. Whereas people did immediately attend to attractive faces, they did not show evidence of differential attention as a function of facial symmetry. This could be interpreted in two main ways. First, it could be argued that sexually selective cognition concerns attunement towards holistically attractive faces, and not specifically to slight variations in features that contribute to attractiveness. Second, it can be argued that facial symmetry is not as important for mate choice as has been argued in the past (e.g., Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999), and therefore does not receive preferential attention. The first interpretation cannot be rejected at the time of writing, because no cueing studies have been performed that use faces that vary in attractive traits other than symmetry, such as facial averageness or sexual dimorphism. The second interpretation, however, seems to concord with recent literature in multiple aspects. First, data-driven approaches to facial attractiveness have recently shown that facial symmetry does not contribute to attractiveness ratings (Holzleitner et al., 2019; Jones & Jaeger, 2019). Second, the link between mate quality and facial symmetry is heavily debated, given the lack of correlation between measures of health and facial symmetry (e.g., Foo et al., 2017; Pound et al., 2014). The results of Chapter 4 corroborate this interpretation, although it is not yet clear whether people show biases in immediate attention towards other traits that are linked to attractiveness, such as facial averageness.Tom Roth.indd 206 08-01-2024 10:42