A social learning primacy trend in mate-copying; an experiment in Drosophila melanogaster

Social learning is learning from the observation of how others interact with the environment. However, in nature, individuals often need to process serial social information and may either favour the most recent information (recency bias), constantly updating knowledge to match the environment, or the information that appeared first in the series (primacy bias), which may slow down adjustment to environmental change. Mate-copying is a widespread form of social learning in a mate choice context related to conformity in mate choice, and where a naïve individual develops a preference for a given mate (or mate phenotype) seen being chosen by conspecifics. Mate-copying is documented in most vertebrate taxa and in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Here, we tested experimentally whether female fruit flies show a primacy or a recency bias by presenting pictures of a female copulating with one of two contrastingly coloured male phenotypes. We found that after two sequential contradictory de..., A mate-copying experiment in D. melanogaster consists of two distinct phases. First, a demonstration phase where the observer female can acquire social information from demonstrators, followed by a mate choice test of the observer. We used the same set-up as previous studies. It was made of two adjacent plastic tubes (0.8 cm x× 3 cm each) that wasere plugged on one side with cotton, and on the other by a microscopy cover slide (1.6 cm x× 1.6 cm) that served as a window from which the observer female could watch the demonstration. Another similar glass partition was placed between the two tubes, separating them. The observer female was placed in the tube adjacent to the side of the demonstration. Demonstrations consisted inof one life-sized picture of a female mating with one of the coloured males with a male of the other colour standing by, as previously done by Nöbel et al.. Pictures were approximately 0.5 cm from the focal female tube. We used 26 different pictures to reduce pseudo-re..., , # Data from: A social learning primacy trend in mate-copying; an experiment in Drosophila melanogaster

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgnr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgnr)

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Please contact Ricardo Santiago Araujo and Guillaume Isabel for any queries: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

## Description

The dataset consists of a simple table with 13 column headers:

* **date**: The date in which the trial took place in YYYY-MM-DD format
* **device**: A numerical ID for the experimental device used for the trial. There is an unique ID for every device, and each device can be used multiple times. Missing or uncertain ID's are marked with a \"?\", as these were recovered from video footage and were sometimes difficult to read/obstructed. See article for more details.
* **treatment**: T (Treatment - 2 contradictory demonstrations); C1 (Control 1: 1 early demonstration); C2 (Control 2: 1 late demonstration). See article ...