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Chapter 238In short, studies on voluntary attention reveal that males tend to prefer looking at opposite-sex pictures, whereas both males and females tend to prefer looking at attractive opposite-sex individuals. Additionally, relationship status and sexual (un)restrictedness appeared to modulate this effect. Taken together, the results of these studies reveal the important role attention plays in mate selection.Recognition memoryFrom an evolutionary perspective, it is important not only to perceive salient social cues from faces but also to memorize attractive faces as remembering attractive individuals may help guide behaviour during recurrent interactions (Avery et al., 2016) or in comparative evaluation of facial cues (Bateson & Healy, 2005). Several studies have investigated the effects of attractiveness on recognition memory. Typically, such studies first present participants with a series of faces that differ in attractiveness. After a brief interval, participants are presented with a new series of images, consisting of novel as well as previously presented stimuli, and are asked to indicate for each image whether they have seen the face before (Wiese et al., 2014). The findings of these studies are mixed. While some studies report enhanced memory for only attractive faces (Lin et al., 2020; Marzi & Viggiano, 2010; Tsukiura & Cabeza, 2011; Zhang et al., 2011), other studies report the opposite effect, namely that participants memorize unattractive faces more accurately (Wang et al., 2016; Wiese et al., 2014), or find no effect of attractiveness on recognition memory (Wickham & Morris, 2003). One potential reason for this discrepancy is that distinctive faces are more likely to be stored in memory. Because average faces are considered more attractive (Jones & Jaeger, 2019; Valentine et al., 2004), unattractive faces might be more likely to stand out in a set of attractive and unattractive faces, thus facilitating their subsequent retrieval from memory. However, one study controlled for the effect of distinctiveness and still found better recognition memory for unattractive faces (Wiese et al., 2014). Nevertheless, this example highlights the need for careful methodology and disentangling of correlated facial characteristics in future studies.Other factors also influence how memorable a face is, for example, the sex of the target face and perceiver. Some findings show that people preferentially remember attractive female faces compared to average female, male, and attractive male faces (Becker et al., 2005). In contrast, other studies suggested that women remember attractive male faces, but men show no such bias (Allan Tom Roth.indd 38 08-01-2024 10:41