Page 202 - Demo

Chapter 9200primates. Moreover, the few studies that have investigated the link between attractiveness and cognition have mainly focused on visual attention, employing a preferential looking paradigm, even though a wide range of test paradigms has been developed to study primate cognition in recent decades. To close this gap, I suggested test paradigms that can be used across species to study sexually selective cognition from a comparative perspective. Furthermore, I discussed how these paradigms can be applied to investigate partner preferences in conservation breeding programmes, which may benefit well-being of captive animals and increase their reproductive success. Primates are characterised by visual specialisation (Barton, 1998; DeCasien & Higham, 2019), and thus studies investigating sexually selected traits tend to focus on conspicuous visual traits (e.g., Petersen & Higham, 2020; Rhodes, 2006). Nevertheless, it has been suggested that research on human attractiveness should also embrace olfactory and auditory attractiveness, as voices and smells can convey a large amount of information about a person (Groyecka et al., 2017). In Chapter 3, I therefore investigated the unique role of visual, auditory, and olfactory attractiveness in human mate choice by combining multimodal attractiveness rating tasks with speed-dating, an ecologically valid paradigm to study human mate choice (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008). Sixty-seven heterosexual adolescents participated in the experiment, resulting in a total of 277 speed dates. The results indicate a strong positive link between idiosyncratic ratings of visual attractiveness before the date and the willingness to date again after the date. However, I found only equivocal effects for the idiosyncratic auditory and olfactory ratings. These findings provide strong evidence for the notion that attractiveness is especially in the eye of the beholder. That is, mainly visual information influences whether we perceive conspecifics as attractive or not. This is in line with a plethora of previous studies. In Chapter 4, I investigated how general ratings of facial attractiveness or variation in attractive traits modulate implicit cognition in humans. Zoo visitors (N = 450 across the three experiments) participated in a dot-probe task (MacLeod et al., 1986) with stimuli varying in attractiveness category, a dot-probe task with stimuli varying in facial symmetry, or a gaze cueing task (Deaner et al., 2007) with stimuli varying in attractiveness category. The stimuli were obtained from a large standardized dataset (Ma, Correll, et al., 2015). In Experiment 1, I presented participants with attractive or unattractive faces paired with intermediately attractive faces. In line with our expectations, the implicit attention of participants Tom Roth.indd 200 08-01-2024 10:42