Attractiveness Modulates Attention, but Does Not Enhance Gaze Cueing

Attractiveness is an important aspect of human society. Attractive people enjoy multiple societal privileges and are assigned positive personality traits, and both men and women find attractiveness important when it comes to partner choice. Our universal preference for beauty might be reflected in implicit perception of human faces. In a series of three studies, we use Bayesian methods to investigate whether attractiveness or attractive traits modulate implicit attention and gaze cuing in a large community sample. In Experiment 1, we used a dot-probe task to measure attentional bias toward attractive faces. The results demonstrate that participants reacted faster when the probe appeared behind an attractive face but not when it appeared behind an unattractive face, suggesting that specifically attractive faces captured attention. In Experiment 2, we used a similar method to test whether facial symmetry, an often-mentioned characteristic of attractive faces, modulated attention. However, we found no such effect. In Experiment 3, we used a gaze-cuing task to test whether participants were more likely to follow the gaze of attractive faces, but no such effect was found. To conclude, attractiveness affects our implicit attention toward faces, but this does not seem to extend to gaze cuing. Public Significance Statement The present study investigates how attractiveness, which is an important aspect of our social environment, affects implicit cognition. Participants selectively attended to attractive faces that were very briefly presented but not to unattractive faces. However, facial attractiveness of the stimuli had no notable influence on the tendency to follow the gaze of the depicted individual.