Time-place learning (TPL) is the process by which animals link events (e.g. finding food, encountering a predator) with both the location and time of occurrence.
[1] It enables them to decide which locations to visit or to avoid based on previous experience and knowledge of the current time of day.
The first evidence for time-place learning in animals came from studies in the 1930s on honeybees, which could be trained to visit two different feeders, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon.
[2] Subsequent work in the 1980s showed that only a few individuals in the colony were able to learn that task, and did so with more precision for the morning than for the afternoon feeding.
Laboratory rats have been taught to enter one arm of a maze in the morning and another in the afternoon, though only 63% of the animals could attain the criterion of nine correct choices over ten consecutive trials.
[15] In a protocol not based on food acquisition, rats swimming in a tank could learn the location of one resting platform in the morning, and another in the afternoon.
Outcomes of time-place tests with rats seem to depend on what behaviors are measured to assess learning, and on the (sometimes too low) costs of not performing well.