Date of Award
2013
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.Sc.
Department
Biological Sciences
Keywords
Biological sciences, Psychology, Foraging, Nonspatial cues, Rats, Spatial cues, Workingmemory
Supervisor
Jerome Cohen
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Animals use various spatial and non-spatial cues when navigating the environment. They can use spatial cues such as a landmark's local position, global position and orientation, or they can use a landmark's non-spatial featural information. The objectives of this thesis were: 1) to determine the conditions under which rats process information separately or simultaneously; 2) to determine how rats process stimuli when previously fixed information becomes more variable; 3) to determine whether animals can use spatial information when a previously encoded non-spatial cue is occasionally eliminated. The results obtained from this research suggest that rats use two different types of processing as a function of variability of redundant information. Moreover, changes within trials were only disruptive for animals that encountered information that had not varied between trials. However, with continued exposure to within-trial changes, these animals' accuracy increased to levels comparable to animals presented with information that varied between trials.
Recommended Citation
Keshen, Corrine Nicole, "Rats' (Rattus norvegicus) Encoding and Retrieval of Spatial and Non-Spatial Environmental Features in a Foraging Task" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4884.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/4884
