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Chapter 9212for manipulating objects or using tools (Bardo et al., 2017). Due to their almost exclusively arboreal life style, orang-utans often need most of their hands and feet to navigate the canopy. Their mouth functions as a ‘fifth’ hand for precise, motoric tasks (Lameira, 2023). Thus, when designing touchscreen tasks for orang-utans, it would be ideal to provide them with the opportunity to use their lips to control the screen. Luckily, systems that allow for this are already available (e.g., Schmitt, 2019), and could be applied more widely in future studies to better accommodate the preferences of participating orang-utans.Another consideration for future studies refers to the cognitive processes that I have focused on. Whereas Chapter 2 outlines multiple promising methods to study sexually cognition, focusing on attention, memory, and motivational processing, I have mostly focused on attentional processes in this thesis. This is for a large part the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has considerably reduced opportunities for research with the orang-utans. While the initial idea was to also study memory for and motivational processing of flanged male stimuli, this became untenable due to the pandemic. However, future projects should ideally employ tasks that measure multiple aspects of sexually selective cognition, so that results can be compared for different aspects of sexually selective cognition. This will also help to elucidate the underlying motives for existing cognitive biases. For example, while an attentional bias can be reflective of both positive or negative interest in a stimulus, this is less likely to be the case in a motivational processing task, where an individual chooses to be exposed to a stimulus. Thus, employing multiple paradigms potentially allows for clearer understanding of the motives that guide cognitive biases.I find it important to note that one of the methods employed in this thesis, namely the dot-probe paradigm, has come under scrutiny in the psychopathology literature in the last decade. The main issues with the paradigm are its relatively poor reliability (e.g., Kappenman et al., 2014; Rodebaugh et al., 2016), lack of ability to discriminate between different attentional processes (e.g., Belopolsky et al., 2011; Koster et al., 2004), and, consequently, discrepancies in findings. With regard to reliability, previous work has identified low internal (Chapman et al., 2019) and external consistency (Jones et al., 2018), while the discussion about attentional processes mainly revolves around the question whether the dot-probe paradigm measures engagement or disengagement of attention (Belopolsky et al., 2011; Fox et al., 2002; Koster et al., 2004). Interestingly, inconsistent results have also been found in primates with the dot-probe paradigm. While the paradigm Tom Roth.indd 212 08-01-2024 10:42