Abstract
We investigated the role of eye movements during judgments of facial attractiveness. Forty participants had to rate high and low attractiveness faces while their eye movements were registered. High attractiveness faces evoked a more configural scanpath compared to low attractiveness faces. This suggests that attractiveness is perceived by collecting information from different regions of the face and by integrating them to form a global representation. Moreover, high attractiveness faces elicited a higher number of fixations compared to low attractiveness faces. Participants looked preferably at the eye region and the poser's left hemiface when the faces were attractive whereas they spent more time fixating the mouth region and the right hemiface in unattractive faces. Our findings are in line with evidence showing that the perception of attractive and unattractive faces relies on different mechanisms.