Page 39 - Demo

Sexually selective cognition in primates372heterosexual men and women with pairs of faces depicting either their preferred or non-preferred sex, which varied in attractiveness. Their findings revealed that participants exhibited an attentional bias toward attractive faces but only when the stimuli matched their preferred sex. Although this study pre-classified pictures as attractive or unattractive, subsequent studies employed stimuli with a wider range of attractiveness ratings and incorporated individual attractiveness ratings instead of pre-classification (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2018; Roth et al., 2023). In general, more recent studies presented combinations of stimuli with a wide range of attractiveness and asked participants to rate the stimuli for attractiveness on a 1 to 7 scale. Subsequently, they found that the difference in attractiveness score between the two simultaneously presented stimuli was positively correlated with the difference in looking time, suggesting that the larger the difference in attractiveness, the stronger the bias toward the attractive face (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2018). Moreover, participants, who were in this case all heterosexual, were especially attentive to attractive faces of the opposite sex (Mitrovic et al., 2018), in accordance with the idea that mate search motives partly shape voluntary attention.The effect of mate search motives on voluntary attention is further supported by the finding that relationship status seems to modulate this effect. Leder et al. (2016) suggested that the correlation between looking time and attractiveness was more robust for single participants than for those in a relationship. In a follow-up study, Mitrovic et al. (2018) confirmed this pattern, as single participants who were more interested in casual sex exhibited a stronger positive correlation between attractiveness ratings and attentional bias than participants in a committed relationship or those who were more sexually restricted. This is in line with a sexual selection explanation, given that single people, particularly those motivated to find a partner, should be more attentive to opportunities in their environment. Moreover, a recent study among single heterosexual adolescents combined a preferential looking task with attractiveness ratings and speed-dating, and found that participants not only had an attentional bias towards attractive opposite-sex faces, but also towards pictures of people they wanted to date, although this effect could be driven by the correlation between attractiveness rating and willingness to date (Roth et al., 2023). Nevertheless, these results highlight the potential link between attentional biases and mate choice.Tom Roth.indd 37 08-01-2024 10:41