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Chapter 472Given our strong preference for attractive individuals, it is not surprising that beauty modulates attention. Indeed, humans automatically attend to attractive faces of opposite-sex individuals (Lindell & Lindell, 2014). Previous research has shown that this attentional bias is evident in both sustained and implicit attention paradigms. For example, in free-viewing paradigms where two faces are presented at the same time, people attend longer to the more attractive face (Leder et al., 2016). Crucially, sustained attention for attractive faces is still apparent after controlling for low-level features, such as luminance and contrast (Li et al., 2016), suggesting that the actual configuration of the face contributed to the attentional bias and not just low-level differences between attractive and unattractive faces. Furthermore, it has recently been suggested that attractiveness interferes with top-down goals. Specifically, presenting attractive faces reduces performance in a visual search task and target orientation judgment (Nakamura & Kawabata, 2014; Sui & Liu, 2009).A well-known paradigm by which attentional biases can be measured is the dot-probe task (MacLeod et al., 1986; van Rooijen et al., 2017). In the dot-probe task, participants view two photographic stimuli presented briefly (typically for approx. 300 ms) on the left and right of the display. Next, one of these stimuli is replaced by a probe. Participants are instructed to quickly and accurately indicate the location of the probe. The interpretation of possible results is straightforward: Since participants selectively attend to salient images, participants respond faster when the probe appears at the same location as the attention-grabbing image (i.e., a congruent trial). Thus, we can infer attentional biases from reaction times (RTs) in the dot-probe task. This paradigm has also been used to investigate attentional bias as a function of attractiveness. For example, Maner et al. (2007) used a modified dot-probe paradigm that presented only one picture per trial. Their findings showed that participants disengaged slower from attractive faces than neutral faces, suggesting that attractiveness holds attention. This effect has since been replicated in further studies that employed the original dot-probe paradigm (Ma et al., 2019; Ma, Zhao, et al., 2015): They found that single individuals had trouble disengaging from attractive faces but did not find evidence that attractive faces capture attention. Thus, while both studies found evidence for a disengagement effect of attractiveness, evidence for immediate capture of attention has not been found using the dot-probe paradigm.However, the previous studies investigating bottom-up effects of attractiveness on attention suffer from three methodological limitations. First, Tom Roth.indd 72 08-01-2024 10:41