Page 218 - Demo

Chapter 9216sensitive during ovulation. Unfortunately, I could not control for ovulation status during the cognitive tasks. Female primates in zoos and sanctuaries are often on birth control or have a dependent infant, which makes it difficult to control for ovulation status during experiments. However, the results of Chapter 8 suggest that investigating cognitive biases towards potential mates would ideally be performed when a female is ovulating. At this point, her biases are most likely to reflect mating motivation, thereby probably making them a more reliable predictor of actual mate choice.Future directionsBased on the implications and considerations outlined above, I will now suggest some future directions for research on mate choice and sexually selective cognition.First, research on cognition and mate choice would benefit from more ecologically valid paradigms to establish links between ratings of attractiveness, cognitive biases, and proxies of mate choice. Chapter 3 and 5 of this thesis provide examples of such an approach in humans, employing speed-dating as a proxy of mate choice (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008). In general, researchers have typically examined the role of attractiveness in human mate choice through isolated experiments where participants rated various samples in terms of attractiveness. Subsequently, these ratings are frequently associated with sample characteristics that are thought to reflect mate quality, such as masculinity and femininity (e.g., Collins & Missing, 2003; Little, Connely, et al., 2011). I see two main issues with this approach, the first of which concerns the fact that this approach lacks ecological validity due to the isolated setting in which the stimuli are presented. For example, subtle differences in isolated olfactory cues might indeed be correlated with attractiveness ratings. However, this does not mean that in a natural setting these subtle differences can be perceived at all, let alone have an effect on human mate choice. Secondly, the traditional approach does not help to establish a link between cues and mate choice behaviour. This link is often implicitly assumed to be there when certain cues are considered attractive. Thus, finding a link between cues that play a role in mate choice and actual mate choice should be a priority in future work.Tom Roth.indd 216 08-01-2024 10:42