A Study of the Peculiarities of the Formation of Behavioral Skills in Rats in a Three-Way Maze

The formation of behavioral skills, consisting of the ability to learn the conditioned reaction of active avoidance, in different lines of rats in a three-way maze has been experimentally studied. To determine the most trained lines, white mongrel rats (100 individuals) and Long Evans and Dumbo rats (30 individuals each) were selected. The conditional stimulus was a combination of turning on a sound and turning off a light in a randomly selected target corridor of the maze. At 5 s after turning on the sound, the light was turned off, an unconditional stimulus (electric current) was supplied to the nontarget corridors and the light was turned on. The task of the rat was to make the transition to the target (safe) way of the maze in response to a sound stimulus. Upon reaching the target, the voltage was removed from the floor of the nontarget corridors and the lights were turned off. The pause between the combinations of conditional/unconditional stimulus was 30 s, the training time for each type of rat was 1 month with 20 presentations of combinations of stimuli per day. Each rat was considered trained with a probability of achieving the goal in 70% or more cases in a time not exceeding 6 s. It has been found that Dumbo rats were best suited for rapid training of large groups of rats to respond to an irritating stimulus.