Data from: 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 demonstrations, females show a tendency to prefer males of
the phenotype preferred in the first demonstration, suggesting that
mate-copying in D. melanogaster is not based on the most recently observed
mating and may be influenced by a form of primacy bias.