Oasis maze

For each rat, the water is always located in the same position relative to the testing room and distal spatial cues.

Local cues are made irrelevant (including odor trails) by rotating the entire apparatus a predetermined distance and direction after each trial.

Thus, this group could develop optimal strategies for finding the water efficiently, but memory of specific locations is irrelevant.

The RANDOM group provides a measure of where rats with no spatial memory of a trained location will spend their search time during probe trials.

At the beginning of each acquisition trial, the rats are placed at 1 of 4 start points (North, South, East, and West) around the edge of the board.

If the rat fails to find the water within 5 min, it is guided to the correct well and allowed to drink.

For example, for rats with training wells in the North, start points for the probe trial are either West or East (counterbalanced within each group).

Second, in the Oasis maze rats have a strong tendency to explore the edges of the board and also to return to the start point.