Habituation of mating preferences: a comment on Daniel Koffinas and Hughes (2019)

摘要

Daniel, Koffinas and Hughes [1] (hereafter DKH) reported that the mating preferences of female Trinidadian guppy (a tropical fish) are subject to habituation, a behavioural phenomenon reflecting a widespread form of ancestral learning in the animal kingdom [2,3]. The authors found that when a female was repeatedly exposed to a male with a given colour pattern, the female mating interest for males with a similar pattern decreased as a function of the number of exposures. DKH also showed that this response decrement presents several features of habituation, such as stimulus specificity (the mating response recovers for a male with a different colour pattern), spontaneous recovery (the response recovers if the habituated male is temporarily removed) and dishabituation (responsiveness to the habituated male recovers after exposure to a novel male).