Probe trials
Probe trials
Take the platform away, and see what the animal remembers.
The probe trial is the water maze's big reveal. Remove the platform, and an animal that has learnt where it was will search there. But what an animal does when the platform has gone depends on more than memory, as Dr Roger Morris argued in 1999.
- What a probe trial isNo platform, 1 to 2 minutes, and the strategies that can fool you.
- Roger Morris's 1999 essayDr Roger Morris's 1999 essay on the limits of the probe test.
- Running a probe trialWhen, how long, and setting it up for tracking.
- Interpreting resultsControl patterns, signs of impairment, and set-up problems that look like results.
For splitting a probe into time bins, see time slices in Morris water maze analysis.