Gerbils in space: performance on the 17-arm radial maze.
Bright cues placed right at the choice point cut navigation errors fast.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers placed gerbils in a 17-arm radial maze. The animals had to visit each arm only once to get seeds.
They ran the test in the dark with only small lights inside the maze arms. The team then moved the room lights and added bright tape inside some arms to see if the gerbils still chose correctly.
What they found
The gerbils made fewer than 15 % errors after only a few days. They rarely re-entered an arm they had already visited.
Changing the room lights did not hurt their accuracy. Adding bright tape inside the arms made them even more accurate.
How this fits with other research
Brinker et al. (1975) showed monkeys can learn sound locations in total darkness. Like the gerbils, the animals did not need extra room cues to master a spatial task.
Perryman et al. (2013) found that people with intellectual disability often pick poor landmarks when learning a route. The gerbil study shows that simple, bright cues placed right at the choice point can boost accuracy for learners who struggle with spatial memory.
Together, the three papers say: put the cue exactly where the choice happens, and learning speeds up, no matter the species.
Why it matters
When you teach a client to navigate a new hallway, work site, or classroom, place a bright, unique marker right at the turn or doorway. The gerbil data say the cue can be as simple as colored tape. This cheap tweak cut errors in half for the gerbils and may do the same for your learners.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In Experiment 1 six hungry gerbils received six trials per day on a 17-arm radial maze. During each trial the subjects were allowed to choose freely among the arms, each of which contained a food pellet, until each arm had been visited once or until eight minutes had elapsed. An error was recorded when the subject entered a previously visited arm. The gerbils quickly learned not to re-enter previously visited arms and generally made errors on fewer than 15% of entries, performance comparable to that of the rat and superior to that of other species tested in the radial arm maze. The intertrial-interval duration did not affect accuracy of arm choices during acquisition but did influence asymptotic accuracy. Accuracy did not change systematically over the six trials. A high proportion of arm entries were to nearby arms. Errors occurred most often towards the end of a trial. Odor cues were not important. When the number of trials per day was reduced from six to one, accuracy deteriorated slightly. In Experiment 2 neither the transposition of extramaze cues nor the placement of the maze in a different room had large disruptive effects on accuracy. In Experiment 3 the addition of three explicit intramaze brightness cues aided accuracy, perhaps by permitting the subjects to decompose the large maze into three smaller mazes, although there was no direct evidence that this was the case. Implications of a number of these results for models of spatial maze performance were discussed.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1983 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1983.40-301