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General introduction171Choosing a partner is one of the most critical decisions that humans make during their life. Even though it is important, the mechanisms underlying mate choice remain a mystery, because mate choice is such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Nevertheless, it has been established that cognition plays a pivotal role in finding a suitable mate. A broad definition of cognition encompasses perception, learning, memory, and decision making, and refers to all mechanisms that allow an individual to acquire, process, store, and act on external information (Shettleworth, 2010). This definition encompasses both fast, reflexive, subconscious processes, also referred to as implicit cognition, and slower, more versatile processes, also referred to as explicit cognition (Frith & Frith, 2008). In the case of mate choice, reflexive attention towards an attractive face could for instance be considered implicit cognition, while selecting the most attractive face out of a set would be considered explicit cognition. The importance of cognitive processes in mate choice can clearly be observed in humans: when asking people to describe how they feel about their loved one or the first encounter with their loved one, they often refer to specific cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and implicit associations. “I could not get my eyes off him”, “She immediately caught my attention”, or “I cannot get him out of my head”: almost everybody has used or heard such statements about a romantic partner. These cognitive processes in the context of mate choice have been termed sexually selective cognition (Maner & Ackerman, 2015; Box 1), which implies that exploring the cognitive mechanisms involved in mate choice and attractiveness can provide valuable insights into a complex phenomenon like mate choice.Even though humans find it very easy to speak about mate choice in cognitive terms, we seem relatively reluctant to apply similar terminology to non-human mate choice. This is also reflected in research: while a plethora of studies has investigated the interplay between cognition and mate choice in humans, only few studies have started to explore this topic in our closest animal relatives. However, from an evolutionary perspective one would expect non-human animals to have analogous or homologous cognitive mechanisms that could help navigating the mate choice process (Bateson & Healy, 2005; Billington et al., 2020; Grammer et al., 2003). Interestingly, the impressive technological developments (e.g., touchscreens and eye-trackers) of the last two decades now allow us to study non-human cognition in more depth, and these developments have enabled researchers to investigate topics like emotion perception (e.g., Kret Tom Roth.indd 17 08-01-2024 10:41