Page 28 - Demo

Chapter 126logically ordered in this thesis, most of them were performed in parallel. Based on the pattern that emerges from the chapters, I have placed them in a logical order. Furthermore, because the chapters were written as independent research articles, they contain some theoretical overlap.Chapter 2 provides a theoretical basis for the empirical chapters, by reviewing previous research that investigated how attractiveness modulates cognition in humans and cognitive biases towards attractive characteristics in primates. Furthermore, I discuss test paradigms that can potentially be used to study mate preferences in primates, some of which will be used in the empirical chapters, and I discuss the practical relevance of applying such tasks to refine zoo breeding programmes.Chapter 3 examines the role of visual, auditory and olfactory attractiveness in human mate choice, using a naturalistic speed-date paradigm and attractiveness rating tasks. The main aim of this chapter was to investigate the notion that human attraction is multimodal, by comparing the relative importance of visual, auditory and olfactory attractiveness on willingness to date again.Taking into account the results of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 specifically focuses on visual cognition by investigating how immediate attention and reflexive gaze cueing in humans are modulated by general ratings of facial attractiveness, and facial symmetry, a trait that is often associated with attractiveness. The goal of this chapter is to test whether attractiveness-driven implicit cognitive biases exist in a community sample, irrespective of idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences. Furthermore, we explored whether such biases were driven by sex and age.Chapter 5 follows up on this work by not relying on pre-defined attractiveness categories, and taking idiosyncratic preferences into account instead. By combining cognitive tasks, attractiveness rating tasks, and speed-dating, I explore to what extent immediate and voluntary visual attention are driven by idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences, and how they relate to human mate choice in a speed-date context. Chapter 6 is the first chapter that moves away from humans. Here, I apply cognitive tasks to measure immediate attention and preference to investigate whether zoo-housed Bornean orang-utans have an immediate attentional bias towards flanges and symmetrical faces, and a choice bias for pictures of flanged males. To study this, I used two well-established computerized task: the dotprobe task to study immediate attention, and a preference test to study choice bias.Tom Roth.indd 26 08-01-2024 10:41