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Chapter 474attractive faces more rapidly and accurately in a sex classification task (Hoss et al., 2005). In addition, one may want to know what information an attractive person is perceiving from the environment by following their gaze to infer their desires and goals (Baron-Cohen, 2014) and obtain social information about them. These sources of information might increase the likelihood of a successful approach, because the network of collected information can help to create an exchange of shared interests. Alternatively, mimicking the gaze of attractive oppositesex conspecifics might facilitate becoming the object of attraction, because mimicking can increase bonding (Chartrand & Lakin, 2013; Prochazkova & Kret, 2017). In line with this idea, single people are more likely to mimic attractive others (Birnbaum et al., 2019; Farley, 2014), and couples show more mimicry compared to platonic friends (Maister & Tsakiris, 2016). Thus, copying the gaze direction of an attractive other might enhance bonding. However, it has not been established whether this translates to mimicking the gaze direction of attractive faces. Previous studies have reported that familiarity (Deaner et al., 2007) and facial masculinity (Jones et al., 2010; Ohlsen et al., 2013) enhance gaze cuing. It is not known, however, whether people are following the gaze direction of an attractive other more readily than that of an unattractive other. These previously observed effects of familiarity and facial masculinity might generalize to facial attractiveness of both males and females as well.Age and sex of the perceivers might modulate biases toward attractiveness. Previous studies on age and attractiveness perception have found that older people are less selective when it comes to rating faces on attractiveness: Overall, they give higher attractiveness ratings than younger people (Ebner et al., 2018; Kiiski et al., 2016). This bias also translates to memory: Younger people show better memory for attractive faces than older people (Lin et al., 2020). These results are in line with the idea that attractiveness is of reduced relevance for older people. In contrast, for younger people, it might be a salient social signal that they, for example, use to identify suitable mates. Similarly, attractiveness might be a more salient signal for men than for women. This is reflected in the fact that men report that they find attractiveness more important when it comes to mate choice than women (Bech-Sørensen & Pollet, 2016; Sprecher et al., 1994) and that men will exert more effort to see attractive opposite-sex faces than women (Hayden et al., 2007). Thus, the bias for attractive faces may differ between age groups and sexes.In the present study, we investigated attractiveness biases in a large Western community sample of adults with a wide age range. We examined (a) whether people Tom Roth.indd 74 08-01-2024 10:41