Study of Peculiarities of the Formation of Behavioral Skills in Rats in the Three-Arm Maze

Abstract

The aim of our experimental research was to explore the formation of behavioral skills such as active avoidance learning in different species of rats in the three-arm maze. To determine which species is the most trainable, our study used 100 white outbred, 30 Long Evans and 30 Dumbo rats. The conditioned stimulus was a combination of playing the sound and turning off the light in a randomly selected target arm of the maze. 5 sec after the buzzer started to sound the light was turned off, then an unconditioned stimulus, the electric power, was applied to non-target arm, and the light was turned on. The task of the rat was to change the arm and enter the target (safety) arm of the maze after the sound stimulus. When the task was done, the floor of non-target arm was not charged furhter and the light was turned off. The interval between conditioned/unconditioned stimulus combinations was 30 s, it took 1 month to train each rat species and 20 sessions with different combinations of stimuli were used every day. The rat was considered trained when the probability of achieving the goal within a time limit not exceeding 6 s is 70% or higher of cases. It has been found that Dumbo rats are the best animals to train quickly in large groups to respond to an irritating stimulus.