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General discussion2179This last point also applies to future work on animal cognition in general. While researchers often investigate cognitive biases using computerized experiments in animals, they are hardly ever linked to behaviour. One exception in non-human primates comes to mind. Ryan et al. (2020) performed an eye-tracking task with infant rhesus macaques, where they measured how long each individual fixated on eyes in facial stimuli. They correlated this to actual social behaviour, and found that individuals that spent more time fixating on eyes during the eyetracking task were also more likely to initiate social interactions. Even though this study shows a trait-level association between looking behaviour and actual social behaviour, and not a link between attentional preferences to social preferences per se, similar studies could help to gain a better understanding of the link between social cognition and social behaviour. While such studies have not yet been performed with regard to mate choice in non-human primates, there are examples from other species. For example, in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), female preferences in an operant and playback experiment that exposes females to male calls corresponds with female preferences in a live mate choice context (Holveck & Riebel, 2007). Other work has shown that allowing females to exert their preferences is associated with higher reproductive success (Ihle et al., 2015). More work on this topic in non-human primates is essential to understand whether preference tasks can be used to predict mate preferences.Furthermore, future studies could consider a more physiological approach to studying mate choice. Measurement of physiological information has already been used to study initial attraction in speed-date studies (Prochazkova et al., 2022; Zeevi et al., 2022). However, these measures could also be combined with cognitive tasks. In the context of mate choice, this has recently been done by Pronk et al. (2021), who presented participants with multiple dating profiles and measured pupil diameter while participants were scanning these profiles. Participants who showed pupil dilation while scanning a profile, were more likely to select this profile as a suitable partner. Similarly, evidence indicates that heart rate variability concords with sexual arousal (Lorenz et al., 2012). Another physiological measure, facial temperature, has recently been shown to vary as a function of emotional valence in humans (Aristizabal-Tique et al., 2023), although some studies argue that facial temperature provides only information about arousal (Kosonogov et al., 2017). Conveniently, most of these physiological measures can also be assessed to some extent in non-human primates noninvasively (pupil: Kret et al., 2014; facial temperature: Kuraoka & Nakamura, 2022; Tom Roth.indd 217 08-01-2024 10:42