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Attractiveness modulates attention934we suggest that future research might study attentional biases toward averaged versus nonaveraged faces.Our third key result, that gaze cuing was not modulated by facial attractiveness, was not in line with our prediction. We did find a strong cuing effect, but this effect was seemingly unaffected by attractiveness category of the stimuli, as participants did not respond faster on congruent trials in the Posner paradigm when attractive faces were displayed. Our findings contradict previous literature describing the effect of evolutionarily relevant facial characteristics on gaze cuing (Deaner et al., 2007; Hori et al., 2005; Jones et al., 2010; Ohlsen et al., 2013). Given that attractiveness is such an important criterion for partner choice, it is surprising that gaze cuing was not modulated by facial attractiveness. One likely explanation is methodological: Jones et al. (2010) found a significant effect of facial dominance on gaze cuing when side-looking stimuli were presented for 200 ms but not when they were presented for 400 ms or 800 ms. On the contrary, in our study, we used a presentation duration of 300 ms. Thus, it might be the case that the subtle effect of facial attractiveness on reflexive gaze following manifests itself only at very short presentation durations. Furthermore, the current gaze-cuing paradigm allows for only indirect inference of the isolated effect of attractiveness on gaze cuing. However, this paradigm does not provide any information about how a person would behave in a situation where people varying in attractiveness look in different directions. In this scenario, would the person shift their gaze in congruence with the most attractive person or not? To answer this question, we believe that an approach that combines the dot-probe and gaze-cuing paradigm has its merits. Such a paradigm would help to further elucidate the link between attractiveness and gaze cuing.One important limitation of our study is the lack of data on motivation of the participants with regard to mate searching. This could possibly explain the null effects that we found in Experiments 2 and 3. Previous work has suggested that motivations might affect implicit cognition in partner choice contexts (Maner & Ackerman, 2015). Consequently, empirical studies have found that attentional biases for attractive faces do not always generalize to all people. For example, attentional biases for attractive faces might only become apparent in people with a short-term mating strategies (Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007; Maner, Gailliot, Rouby, et al., 2007) or in participants who are not in a romantic relationship (Ma et al., 2019; Ma, Zhao, et al., 2015). It is theoretically possible that people who are motivated to find a partner are more likely to show an implicit attentional Tom Roth.indd 93 08-01-2024 10:41