**1. Introduction**

Socialization and mate selection theories propose that perceivers value attractiveness more when the target is female than male targets [1–5]. Specifically, socialization theories posit that humans learn to value females' attractiveness more than males' attractiveness and this differential valuation is reflected in how individuals judge and treat females and males based on appearance [2, 3, 5]. Mate selection theories posit that attractiveness is more strongly related to

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

females' health and reproductive value as compared to males' [1, 4], so attractiveness should be a more salient and valued attribute among women than men. In contrast to these theoretical viewpoints and adults and children's beliefs that physical appearance is more important for females than males [6–8], meta-analytic reviews of the attractiveness literature suggested there were no differences in how attractiveness affected individuals' ratings, impressions, and treatment of female and male targets [9–11]. It was noted, however, that studies including both female and male targets or comparisons between reactions to female and male targets were lacking, making it difficult to conclude whether there are truly differences in the importance of attractiveness for the two sexes [11].

In this chapter, we take a different theoretical approach to understanding the importance of attractiveness for female and male targets. Specifically, we discuss how cognitive representations for faces (i.e., how individuals mentally represent human faces) guide preferences for attractiveness. A seminal study demonstrated that adults perceive summary representations of faces (i.e., faces mathematically averaged together) as attractive [12]. Since its publication, empirical studies have supported the notion that facial *averageness* (the average value of the population of faces to which one is exposed) is attractive [13–16] and affectively rewarding [17]. Yet, early in development, infants and children have predominant experience with females [18–22], so the population to which they are exposed is more heavily weighted toward females than males, which impacts their cognitive representation of faces [23]. With changes in social experience and how individuals represent faces between infancy and adolescence, there are also developmental changes in the saliency of attractiveness for female and male targets. This chapter thus proposes a cognitive developmental perspective for understanding differential trajectories in the development of children's attractiveness preferences and biases for female and male targets.
