Rats Repeatedly Placed on a Hidden Platform Learn but Quickly Forget Its Location

Rats were pretrained to escape from cool water by swimming to a platform hidden at a fixed location in a swimming pool. They were then placed a number of times on a platform at a new location in another pool in a new room. Rats placed on the platform subsequently swam to it more quickly than rats that were not placed or rats placed in inappropriate locations. Rats required 10-15 placements on the platform before swimming directly to it on a test trial. An interval of as little as 2 hr between placement and testing eliminated the advantage of previous placement. These results unambiguously demonstrate that rats can latently acquire spatial information, and they disclose some performance features of latent spatial learning.