ArticleScience advances2017
Female brain size affects the assessment of male attractiveness during mate choice.
Article in Science advances, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
- Spatiotemporal Patterns of Gene Expression Associated With Mating Stimuli in the Brain of Female Guppies.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2025Article
- Experimental data suggest between population reversal in the condition dependence of two sexually selected traits.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Genetic and context-specific effects on individual inhibitory control performance in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata).Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Article
- Evolution of schooling drives changes in neuroanatomy and motion characteristics across predation contexts in guppies.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Cognitive performance is linked to fitness in a wild primate.Science advances · 2023Article
- Immediate predation risk alters the relationship between potential and realised selection on male traits in the Trinidad guppyProceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Changes in Red Color Sensitivity over the Spawning Cycle of Female Three-spined Stickleback (Zoological studies · 2022Article
- Rapid mosaic brain evolution under artificial selection for relative telencephalon size in the guppy (Science advances · 2021Article
- An integrative measure of cognitive performance, but not individual task performance, is linked to male reproductive output in budgerigars.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Darwin, sexual selection, and the brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Brain size does not predict learning strategies in a serial reversal learning test.The Journal of experimental biology · 2020Article
- Experimental translocations to low predation lead to non-parallel increases in relative brain size.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Artificial selection on brain size leads to matching changes in overall number of neurons.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
- Mate assessment behavior is correlated to learning ability in female threespine sticklebacks.Current zoology · 2019Article
- (Under)water love-linking mate choice and cognition in fish and frogs.Current zoology · 2019Article
- Early neurogenomic response associated with variation in guppy female mate preference.Nature ecology & evolution · 2018Article
- Environmentally induced changes to brain morphology predict cognitive performance.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Reviewing guppy color vision: integrating the molecular and physiological variation in visual tuning of a classic system for sensory drive.Current zoology · 2018Article
- Mate choice in the eye and ear of the beholder? Female multimodal sensory configuration influences her preferences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Male-biased gene expression resolves sexual conflict through the evolution of sex-specific genetic architecture.Evolution letters · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mate choice decisions are central in sexual selection theory aimed to understand how sexual traits evolve and their role in evolutionary diversification. We test the hypothesis that brain size and cognitive ability are important for accurate assessment of partner quality and that variation in brain size and cognitive ability underlies variation in mate choice. We compared sexual preference in guppy female lines selected for divergence in relative brain size, which we have previously shown to have substantial differences in cognitive ability. In a dichotomous choice test, large-brained and wild-type females showed strong preference for males with color traits that predict attractiveness in this species. In contrast, small-brained females showed no preference for males with these traits. In-depth analysis of optomotor response to color cues and gene expression of key opsins in the eye revealed that the observed differences were not due to differences in visual perception of color, indicating that differences in the ability to process indicators of attractiveness are responsible. We thus provide the first experimental support that individual variation in brain size affects mate choice decisions and conclude that differences in cognitive ability may be an important underlying mechanism behind variation in female mate choice.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.