Sexually Selective Cognition: Beauty Captures the Mind of the Beholder

Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a) both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b) limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females, (c) although females selectively attend to attractive males, limiting females' attentional capacity does not lead to biased estimates of attractive males, (d) observers of both genders exhibit enhanced recognition memory for attractive females but attenuated recognition for attractive males. Results suggest that different mating-related motives may guide the selective processing of attractive men and women.