Abstract:  Facial attractiveness is of particular relevance to evolution. Facial attractiveness can be perceived rapidly and subsequently pose large impacts on other cognitive processes. Researchers have done a lot of behavioral and neural studies on the roles of facial attractiveness from the perspectives of attention, temporal perception, learning, memory, and decision-making over recent years. The discrepancies in past research mainly focused on the different behavioral and neural responses evoked by facial attractiveness in similar experimental tasks. There are also several extensible aspects in this line of research, such as the topics, technical methods and materials. Future fMRI studies are needed to further explore the neural mechanisms of how facial attractiveness influences cognition.

Key words: facial attractiveness, attention, temporal perception, memory, decision-making