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Chapter 9214biases and subsequent behaviour. While previous research has established such a link at trait level (Eastwick et al., 2011), I demonstrated that cognitive tasks might be predictive of differential behaviour towards potential mates instead of a general tendency to evaluate potential mates as suitable or not. In other words, this finding suggests that attraction to another is reflected in implicit cognitive processes. Dating apps or websites could therefore consider a more cognitivebased approach to identifying preferred partners. Currently, dating websites mostly rely on self-reported personality information and attitudes, and explicitly stated preferences. Dating apps like Tinder, on the other hand, rely on sequential presentation of potential partners. Both of these have important shortcomings. First, several studies have shown that explicitly stated preferences for personality traits in potential partners fail to predict initial mate choice (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Joel et al., 2017; Tidwell et al., 2013). Second, in sequential presentation paradigms of faces, people tend to develop suboptimal sampling heuristics (Furl et al., 2019; Lee & Courey, 2020).To solve these issues, dating websites and apps could try to implement a more implicit first filter by using eye-tracking tasks for example. Recent developments in webcam- (Semmelmann & Weigelt, 2018) or even smartphone-based eyetracking (Valliappan et al., 2020) allow for measuring attentional preferences by presenting a grid of pictures of potential partners. These attentional preferences could be considered the first filter, after which people can further explore the profiles of the potential partners that they attended to. The benefit of such an approach is that it fits more closely with the human mate choice process: it allows participants to implicitly sample different options based on visual cues, without inducing decision-making biases that are characteristic of dating apps like Tinder. After applying such a first filter, users could be allowed to further explore the profiles and pictures of potential mates that attracted their attention, so that there is still room for exercising explicit preferences.Another practical goal of this thesis was to explore methods to identify mate preferences of zoo-housed orang-utans. Reproductive success of zoo-housed orang-utans is relatively low compared to other great ape species (Kaumanns et al., 2004). Developing methods to identify individual mate preferences could potentially help to solve this, as it would allow for better matching of individuals across zoos (Asa et al., 2011). However, based on the results presented in this thesis, such methods do not yet seem feasible for application within the orangutan breeding programme. Apart from the methodological considerations (see Tom Roth.indd 214 08-01-2024 10:42