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Chapter 234reasonable to expect that humans selectively attend to attractive conspecifics (Krupp, 2008; Lindell & Lindell, 2014).Selective attention involves three main components: engagement, disengagement, and attentional shifting (Blicher et al., 2020; Posner & Petersen, 1990). While engagement refers to the start of selective attention to a stimulus, disengagement refers to the termination of attention to a specific stimulus. Disengagement can be followed by shifting attention and engaging with another stimulus (Blicher et al., 2020; Koster et al., 2006). Importantly, attentional biases can manifest in multiple components of selective attention. For example, threatening stimuli might receive preferential engagement (Carretié, 2014) and, at the same time, be more difficult to disengage from (Cisler & Koster, 2010). Furthermore, attentional biases can become apparent in preferential looking designs, in which people can voluntarily attend to different stimuli within a certain timeframe (Winters et al., 2015). These designs do not test a specific component of attention but instead allow participants to engage, disengage, and shift attention multiple times. In this section, we discuss whether people have attentional biases towards attractive faces specifically with regard to (1) engagement, (2) disengagement, and (3) voluntary attention.EngagementTo navigate our romantic environment, it is essential to focus on attractive conspecifics. Accordingly, research indicates that human attention is immediately captured by attractive faces. For instance, people can detect the location of attractive stimuli above chance accuracy, even when the images are shown for only 100 ms (Guo et al., 2011), and the presentation of attractive faces as distractor stimuli for 100 or 200 ms results in lengthened task performance in a spatial cueing task (Sui & Liu, 2009). Furthermore, studies with longer presentation times (300 ms) have shown that participants attend more to attractive faces than to unattractive ones, irrespective of participants’ age and sex (Roth et al., 2022). Nevertheless, another recent study did find indications for a sex difference in engaging with attractive stimuli: men’s reaction times, but not those of women, were influenced by their individual attractiveness preferences (Roth et al., 2023). This highlights that research into sex differences in immediate attention is still inconclusive. In summary, while humans tend to preferentially engage with attractive faces, more research is needed to understand how demographic factors such as age and sex influence this bias.Tom Roth.indd 34 08-01-2024 10:41