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Sexually selective cognition in primates352A slightly subtler pattern emerges from eye-tracking studies on the attentional engagement of erotic and attractive stimuli. Fromberger et al. (2012) studied initial fixation in heterosexual men and found that participants were more likely to fixate on pictures of women than on pictures of men. However, this bias did not generalize to pictures of boys and girls, suggesting that this immediate attentional bias was present only in the context of sexually relevant stimuli. Subsequently, Dawson & Chivers (2016, 2018) presented pairs of female and male stimuli to participants. Their results extended these finding by showing that heterosexual men are more likely to fixate on women than men. However, interestingly, their findings showed that women fixated equally frequently on men and women, suggesting that they do not exhibit the same bias as men. Thus, men and women seem to exhibit different patterns in attentional engagement when using more sensitive measures, such as eye-tracking.Moreover, using a similar paradigm in which target photographs displayed two same-sex stimuli differing in attractiveness, Leder et al. (2016) found no difference in the proportion of first fixations landing on the most attractive face. This was also the case in a paradigm in which attractive and unattractive faces were embedded in real-world scenes (Leder et al., 2010). Thus, findings from eye-tracking studies suggest that attractive stimuli may not immediately capture attention, which differs from the results obtained from computerized tasks. Altogether, although men’s attention seems to be captured by female stimuli, the attractiveness of the depicted individuals does not seem to affect the initial fixations. DisengagementDo attractive faces hold attention? Studies examining this question seem to converge on the finding that humans have trouble disengaging from attractive faces. In general, these studies employ a cuing task: a picture is presented in the center of the screen (500 ms) and then replaced by an object in one quadrant of the screen. Participants need to indicate the shape of the object by pressing a corresponding key. If a stimulus holds attention, people are expected to respond slower on the key press task. Using this approach, Maner et al. (2007) found that sexually unrestricted participants, who were more promiscuous and more open to casual sex, disengaged slower from stimuli that depicted attractive opposite-sex faces using a dot-probe task. Similarly, a series of studies with a Chinese sample using a slightly different version of the task showed that single women (Ma, Zhao, Tom Roth.indd 35 08-01-2024 10:41