The phrase "acquire a preference" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when discussing the process of developing a liking or inclination towards something over time.
Example: "Over the years, I have acquired a preference for classical music over pop."
Alternatives: "develop a preference" or "form a preference."
Taken together, WKY rats appear to be more sensitive to high doses of cocaine and need more experience with the drug to acquire a preference than SD rats.
The measure of learning speed is the number of trials required to acquire a preference.
Despite this change the hippocampal group again failed to acquire a preference for the long over the short panels.
If the hippocampus is not important for spatial learning that takes place as the animal makes its way to the goal, then rats with hippocampal lesions should acquire a preference for the corner housing the platform over any other corner.
If a naive subject rat interacts with a demonstrator rat that has recently sampled a particular novel food substance, the naive animal acquires a preference for that food that can persist for many days.
But Craig Packer, a University of Minnesota biologist who's spent decades researching big cats including maneaters, said there are credible cases of individual animals that have acquired a preference for two-legged prey, particularly in rural communities in Africa and Asia.
The Russian bureaucracy, whose members were often drawn from the military, thus acquired a preference for uniformity and militarism that did not foster respect or concern for the individual needs of the various regions and peoples of the far-flung empire.
Similarly, under the S+/C- condition, rats rapidly acquired a preference for lever S which became statistically reliable on day 7.
Thus, despite near maximal cocaine sampling, rats under the S+/C+ condition acquired a preference for lever S as quickly as rats under the S+/C- condition.
Because control hamsters had acquired a preference in the initial CPP test, learning the association between the new chamber and wheel required that the animals override the previous memory.
As expected, in rats which acquired a preference for lever C under the S-/C+ condition, cocaine induced a rapid increase in locomotion which peaked 1 min post-injection and then returned gradually to baseline within the 10-min inter-trial interval (Fig. 3a).
