Beauty in the eye of the beholder: Attention to attractive faces dissociates across covert and overt measures.

Attractive faces attract attention. Here, we examined how facial attractiveness influenced covert and overt social attention. Participants discriminated targets occurring after one of 32 different face-object cue pairs, which varied in the degree of attractiveness. Experiment 1 measured covert social attention in manual responses while maintaining central fixation. No evidence of attentional preference for faces was found. Experiment 2 measured overt social attention in eye movements while maintaining natural viewing conditions. A reliable oculomotor preference for attractive faces was found. Thus, facial attractiveness affects covert and overt social attention differently, reflecting the diverging ways in which faces affect attention with respect to social functioning in daily life. The datasets for all experiments can be found on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/u54tp/ ).