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Chapter 494bias for symmetrical faces, for example. In line with this idea, sociosexuality predicted explicit preferences for symmetrical male faces in women (Quist et al., 2012). Therefore, we want to emphasize the need for future studies to incorporate relationship status and measures of sociosexuality when investigating implicit cognition. The same applies to context-dependent gaze cuing; while we did not find evidence that attractive opposite-sex faces enhance gaze cuing, this does not rule out such an effect in other mate choice contexts. For example, people might follow the gaze of attractive same-sex conspecifics in a mate choice context to identify which opposite-sex individuals they attend to. Such explicit mate choice copying has been described for both men and women (Place et al., 2010; Waynforth, 2007), but future work could establish whether this generalizes to implicit gaze cuing. Thus, incorporating individual motivations and exploring different mate choice contexts might help to further elucidate the effect of attractiveness on implicit cognition.Importantly, we found no effect of sex on bias toward attractiveness in either of the experiments. Our findings are in line with what (Maner et al., 2003) call the opposite-sexed beauty captures the mind hypothesis and contrast with the one-sided gender bias hypothesis. Thus, both men and women in our study seemed to selectively focus on attractive opposite-sex faces. Similarly, we found no effect of age group on attractiveness bias: Participants of both reproductive and postreproductive age had a similar bias toward attractive faces. Taken together, these results suggest that the effect of attractiveness on social cognition generalizes over sex and age. However, studies using a clear mate search context are necessary to confirm these findings.In conclusion, our findings corroborate previous research on attractiveness bias by showing an implicit attentional bias toward attractive faces, likely reflecting an attention capture effect, in a Western sample with a wide age range. Thereby, our results demonstrate how facial attractiveness, a characteristic that is highly relevant from an evolutionary perspective, affects implicit social cognition. However, we did not find an effect of attractiveness on gaze cuing. Nevertheless, we believe that incorporating individual motivations and applying more ecologically valid paradigms can help to further elucidate the link between attractiveness and gaze cuing.Tom Roth.indd 94 08-01-2024 10:41