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

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). While the study is certainly of interest, because it shows that habituation can affect biologically significant stimuli, we regretfully have to note that DKH have completely overlooked two areas of research whose results are highly relevant for the question addressed in their study and that can help to understand the reported findings.