Juvenile experience alters strategies used to solve the radial arm maze in rats

Abstract

Previous research demonstrated that juvenile rats solve the radial arm maze by selecting adjacent arms, whereas adult rats use a less restrictive response strategy. In the present experiment, these findings were replicated and extended to include a third group of rats tested both as juveniles and as adults, and these response patterns were compared in two strains of rats. Radial eight-arm maze performance was assessed daily for 10 days in juvenile and adult Long Evans and Sprague-Dawley rats. In both strains, juveniles made significantly more adjacent arm entries than did adults. In addition, both strains of rats, when retested as adults, continued to use the adjacent arm entry strategy established during juvenile training, rather than adopting the maze-naive adult strategy. Together, these results support previous findings demonstrating that juvenile rats use an adjacent arm entry strategy to solve the radial eight-arm maze, whereas adult rats do not. In addition, these findings suggest that juvenile maze experience produces a long-lasting change in the response patterns of rats in the radial eight-arm maze. © 1995, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.