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A Within-Subject Experimental Design using an Object Location Task in Rats
Published on: May 6, 2021
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Modelling of What-Where-When Everyday Memories in Rats
Kayleigh Kanakis1, Richard G M Morris2, Francesco Gobbo2,3
1School of Psychology and Neuroscience, College of Medical, Veterinary, and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
The European Journal of Neuroscience
|October 14, 2025
Summary
Rats can learn and recall specific food locations and understand temporal differences in flavor availability. These findings offer new models for studying episodic-like memory components in the brain.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Animal Behavior
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Episodic memory involves what, where, and when an event occurred.
- Episodic-like memory studies in animals face limitations.
- Neural correlates of 'what-where-when' are known but their integration is unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce novel behavioral paradigms for studying episodic-like memory in rats.
- To model the 'what-when' and 'where' components of memory.
- To provide a basis for investigating memory storage and retrieval.
Main Methods:
- Developed two new behavioral tasks based on everyday memory.
- Experiment 1 (E1) tested spatial memory for food locations.
- Experiment 2 (E2) tested temporal memory for flavor replenishment.
Main Results:
- Rats learned to independently retrieve food from two distinct daily positions.
- Rats learned to use temporal information about flavor replenishment for decision-making.
- Demonstrated rats' ability to integrate 'what', 'where', and 'when' information.
Conclusions:
- The developed paradigms effectively model key components of episodic-like memory.
- These tasks facilitate research into the neural basis of memory storage and retrieval.
- Future studies can utilize these models for single-unit recording and calcium imaging.
