Competition over access for mates has led to the evolution of many striking examples of morphological traits and behaviour in animals. The rapid development of the sexual selection field in recent decades have dramatically advanced our understanding of what traits make individuals more successful in attracting mates and how preferences for mates evolve over time. However, till now, research in this field has put less emphasis on the mechanisms that underlie variation in mate choice and sexual behaviour. Cognitive processes could potentially be key drivers of individual variation in mating preferences and sexual behaviours and therefore deserve further investigation. In this thesis, I used guppies artificially selected for relative brain size as the model system to study the association between brain size, cognitive ability and various aspects of mate choice. Previous studies in this model system showed that large-brained individuals of both sexes outperformed small-brained individuals in cognitive tests. Here I quantified their sexual behaviours and mating preferences to provide novel empirical data concerning the association between brain size, cognitive ability and sexual selection. In dichotomous choice preference tests based on visual cues, comparisons between large-brained and small-brained guppies showed important differences in their assessment of mate quality. These results are not driven by pre-existing visual biases caused by the artificial selection since further investigation of the visual capacity of these fish detected no differences between large-brained and small-brained individuals in their sensitivity to colour or in their capacity to resolve spatial detail. I also quantified sexual behaviour in male guppies artificially selected for relative brain size and found no difference in the behaviours of large-brained and small-brained males in a single male-single female non-competitive scenario. On the contrary, in a more complex social setting I found a reduction in large-brained males in the rate of courtship towards females and dominance displays towards other males when exposed to different degrees of predation threat and different numbers of male competitors. However, this reduction in behavioural intensity did not result in a lower access to copulation with females for large-brained males. I likewise evaluated female sexual behaviour and found that large-brained females had higher behavioural flexibility such that they decreased their receptiveness towards males more strongly under higher levels of predation threat. Together, these results provide novel empirical evidence that brain size and cognitive ability are tightly linked to mating preferences and sexual behaviours. These findings suggest that brain size and cognitive ability might be important mechanisms behind variation in mating preferences and in sexually selected traits across and within species. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 5: Manuscript.</p>

The purpose of this thesis was to develop methodology by which treatments for the cognitive impairments in Huntington's disease (HD) could be tested. As such, the thesis focused mainly on evaluating rats with quinolinic acid (QA) lesions of the striatum, as this manipulation mimics some aspects of the neural damage in Huntington's disease, to try to identify cognitive deficits of HD resulting from cell loss in the striatum. In the first part (Chapters 3-5), the role of the striatum in implicit memory was investigated. Chapter 3 compared the performance of rats and humans on a reaction time task that evaluated implicit memory by presenting visual stimuli with differing probabilities which change over time. Although rats made higher percentage of incorrect responses and late errors, both groups showed a similar pattern of reaction times. Chapter 4 investigated whether implicit memory (the computation of probabilities to predict the location of a stimulus) was affected by selective blockade of dopaminergic transmission at the D1 or D2 receptors by SCH-23390 and raclopride, respectively. Reaction times were slower with SCH-23390 and raclopride, but only SCH-23390 reduced errors to the least probable target location. Chapter 5 used the same task to evaluate implicit memory in rats with QA lesions of the dorsomedial striatum (DMS). Implicit memory was not affected by lesions of the DMS, which suggested that once a task that requires implicit memory has been learned, the DMS was not involved in sustaining the performance of the task. The second part of this thesis (Chapter 6), explored the contribution of the DMS in habit formation. DMS lesioned rats did not show habitual responding, and were not impaired in learning a new goal-directed behaviour. The third part (Chapters 7 and 8), investigated the role of the dorsal striatum in reversal learning, attentional set-formation, and set-shifting. Dorsal striatum lesioned rats were not impaired in reversal learning, but had a diminished shift-cost, which suggested that dorsal striatum lesions disrupted the formation of attentional sets. These results showed that although QA lesions of the dorsal striatum mimic some aspects of the neural damage in HD, they did not result in the same cognitive deficits observed in patients with HD, at least using the tasks presented in this thesis. However, other animal models of HD could be evaluated using the different tasks presented in this thesis to continue the search of a reliable animal model of HD in which treatments for the disease could be evaluated.