Page 77 - Demo

Attractiveness modulates attention754have an attentional bias toward attractive faces and unattractive faces, compared to intermediately attractive faces in a dot-probe task; (b) whether subtle differences in facial symmetry, a trait that has been linked to attractiveness, modulate attention in a dot-probe task; and (3) whether facial attractiveness modulates gaze following a modified Posner cuing task. Unattractive and asymmetrical faces were added as a control as they form another “extreme” category of a face type that is, like very attractive or symmetrical faces, not very common.In Experiment 1, if participants would selectively attend to more attractive faces, we expected faster RTs on trials in which the probe appeared behind the attractive face (in the attractive vs. intermediate condition) and possibly the intermediate face (in the unattractive vs. intermediate condition). However, if participants would selectively attend to both attractive and unattractive faces because both deviate from the average face, we expected faster RTs on trials in which the probe appeared behind the attractive face (in the attractive vs. intermediate condition) and unattractive face (in the unattractive vs. intermediate condition). We had similar expectations for Experiment 2; if facial symmetry is a salient social signal, we would expect participants to selectively attend to the most symmetrical face in each condition. However, if very symmetrical and asymmetrical faces both attract attention because they deviate from average, we would expect faster RTs on trials where the probe appears behind the symmetrized or asymmetrized stimulus (paired with original picture). Furthermore, in Experiment 3, we expected that people would follow the gaze direction of attractive faces particularly, which would make them respond faster on congruent trials where the probe appeared in the location the attractive face was gazing at. In addition, in all three experiments, we expected the biases to be more pronounced in male participants and in younger participants, since attractiveness is a more salient signal for these groups.Experiment 1MethodParticipantsExperiment 1 included 150 participants (82 females, mean age = 31.49 years, SD = 12.79, ranging from 18 to 74 years old). Participants were visitors at the Apenheul Primate Park (Apeldoorn, the Netherlands). All participants self-reported normal or Tom Roth.indd 75 08-01-2024 10:41