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Chapter 492words showed this effect. The current study builds on this work and extends it in several ways. First, we not only included the comparison between attractive and intermediately attractive faces but also included the comparison between unattractive and intermediately attractive faces. Consequently, we can conclude that participants selectively attended to attractive but not unattractive faces. This finding suggests that the attentional bias toward attractive faces is not merely the result of attractive faces deviating from the average face, as this is the case for unattractive faces as well. Second, using a large community sample with a wide age range, we were able to show that attractiveness also influences attention in Western people, regardless of their age or gender. Third, we limited the stimulus presentation duration to 300 ms to make it unlikely that participants shifted gaze once their attention had been captured by one of the two presented images (Petrova et al., 2013). Longer presentation durations allow such oculomotor shifts to occur; however, they are not recorded and thus yield noisier data (van Rooijen et al., 2017). Therefore, our results are likely to represent an attentional capture effect, while the previous studies mainly found disengagement effects. Thus, with a few methodological adjustments and a more heterogeneous sample, we were able to show that attention to attractive faces is likely a more general effect than previously assumed.Our second key result, namely that facial symmetry does not affect implicit attention, was against our expectations. If facial symmetry were an important signal reflecting mate quality, one would expect symmetrical faces to modulate implicit attention. It is important to note that some recent studies have questioned the evolutionary importance of facial symmetry. For example, not all studies show that symmetry correlates with health (Pound et al., 2014), and symmetrical faces are more attractive even after removing symmetry information by showing only half of the face. This indicates that other factors that are correlated with symmetry may cause the high attractiveness ratings for symmetrical faces (Scheib et al., 1999). Furthermore, recent data-driven approaches to facial attractiveness have cast doubt on the importance of symmetry (Holzleitner et al., 2019; Jones & Jaeger, 2019). For example, Jones & Jaeger (2019) recently studied the differential effects of facial characteristics on the perception of attractiveness. They concluded that symmetry of facial shape is not informative when it comes to predicting attractiveness. Instead, they concluded that shape averageness is a more accurate predictor of attractiveness. Therefore, based on this perspective, Tom Roth.indd 92 08-01-2024 10:41