Dr Tomer Czaczkes, a biologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany who led the study, was inspired to look into the phenomenon after noticing spiders displaying uncharacteristic behaviour and making their webs on lights during his night-time walk home from work.
"I was walking down a road one night, looking at all these fats spiders in their webs on lights. I wondered if they were evolving to like light."
Dr Czaczkes and a team of researchers at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich, and Aarhus University in the Netherlands gathered spider egg sacs from urban and rural locations across Germany, France, Italy and placed the hatchlings that came from them into boxes that were exposed to light on one side and kept in the dark on the other.
"We found that rural spiderlings avoided the light side and liked building their webs in the dark," said Ana María Bastidas-Urrutia, a biologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and co-author of the study.
"The urban spiderlings really didn't care where they built their webs. The light didn't seem to bother them."
The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal The Science of Nature, believe the shift in behaviour to be an evolutionary change likely precipitated by a search for food.
Insects like moths, which the spiders prey upon, are often attracted to artificial lights, also making them an ideal location to build a web.
Because the spiders used in the study were gathered before they hatched scientists are convinced that the behaviour is due to genetic changes as they would not have had the time to learn to exploit the increased amount of prey found in light areas.
The study focussed on the Steatoda triangulosa spider - more commonly known as the false widow spider.
Commonly found in southern Europe, the false widow's encroachment on to UK has caused concern in recent years, with reports of children and animals suffering painful bites and in some cases schools having to close when infestations were discovered.
Akin to other spiders in the Steatoda genus, the false widow can be easily identified by its web, which - unlike the neat orb-shaped webs of other species - is shaped as a seemingly formless tangle often found in the corners of unused rooms and attics.
Dr Czaczkes and his team believe similar adaptations to light may well also be occurring in other species of spiders found in urban areas.
Lawrence Bee, from the British Arachnological Society, said that he agreed it was likely that the spiderswere adapting to illuminated conditions as there was more prey around those areas at night.
"Lights attract quite a community of insects at night, so it is not a real surprise that spiders might adapt to that sort of thing. At this time of year they are generally more active in the home so homeowners might be encountering them more, but it is hard to say if that has anything to do with them losing any fear of light," he said.
Dr Maxime Dahirel, an ecologist at Ghent University in Belgium who has studied spiders and urbanisation, added: "The responses to light will likely depend on the species."
"A recent paper showed that increased exposure to light led to reduced survival in another spiderspecies. There may be some positive effects for some species but likely negative ones for many others."
