Translational Difficulties in Querying Rats on "Orientation"

The aim of this study was to translate the "orientation" query of the ADAS-Cog inventory to rats and to investigate whether they can determine which time of the day they are. For this purpose, we established a modified Morris water-maze navigation task where the escape platform was placed onto various locations at different times of the day: "morning", "noon" and "evening". In each of these sessions rats swam a "query" trial and a "confirmatory" trial, 30 min apart. Lister Hooded rats randomly chose among the three possible target locations, while Long Evans rats partly followed a win-stay strategy by preferring to visit first to the platform position of the previous session. Despite simplifying the task to a morning-evening discrimination, Lister Hooded rats continued searching by chance, while Long Evans rats switched to the mentally less demanding random strategy. We then inserted a board into the pool which required longer swimming path from the animals when they were correcting an initial wrong choice, but this modification did not result in a change in the above strategies. Lastly, in a separate group of Long-Evans rats, the training conditions were modified inasmuch an incorrect choice was definitely punished by impeding the animals to correct it and confining them to a platform-free part of the maze for the whole trial period. However, even these stricter conditions were not sufficient to make the rats distinguish times of the day. The observed lack of time discrimination may source from an evolutionary built in mechanism characteristic for the rat species or this ability may have only been lost in laboratory rats.