For the next two weeks, I ran radial arm maze
(RAM) trials. A total of 12 trials were run to see if the animals had learned
and had improved their times and memory of going into the correct arm. During
the first week, some rats still took the full 10 minutes in the maze, but by
the second week all of the rats completed the maze in under 10 minutes. While
this was a time consuming experiment because I had to record the data myself
and there wasn't a computer doing it like for the attention task, I actually
enjoyed it. It was fun to see which rats progressed faster and it was also
exciting when a rat would finally understand the maze. There were a few rats
that went in the maze in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion, whereas some
rats just went to different arms but still finished in under 10 minutes. This
was also a cool experiment to see because I have seen the Templeton project
rats since they were weaned from their mothers, so it has been interesting to
see them "grow up."
For the RAM experiment, the rat is put into
the black bucket in the center of the maze for about 10 seconds. The bucket is
then removed and the rat explores the arms of the maze and hopefully remembers
which ones are baited and which ones are not. Any time the rat enters an arm,
it is recorded. At the end of the session, either when the rat has entered all
of the baited arms or 10 minutes has passed, the rat is returned to its home
cage. Then I calculate the working memory errors, reference memory errors, and
latency. Working memory errors are how many times the rat entered an arm the
was baited past the initial time it entered, and also if it did not enter a
baited arm at all. This is because they are only supposed to enter a baited arm
once and remember they entered it. For reference memory errors, that is how
many times the rat entered the arms that were not baited. And latency is the time
divided by how many times the rat entered each arm.
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| Radial arm maze |
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