Sex differences in the strategies used by rats to solve a navigation task.

Rodríguez, Clara A.; Torres, Angélica; Mackintosh, N. J.; Chamizo, Victoria D.

doi:10.1037/a0017297

Cited by 41 publications

(90 citation statements)

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“…From this small set of findings, it appears that men might be better at using geometric cues compared to women. This would parallel the sex differences that have been found for rats in water-maze search tasks, where both sexes can use geometric or proximal feature cues to locate a hidden platform, but male rats rely more heavily on geometric cues and female rats prefer to use a proximal feature cue (Rodriguez, Chamizo, & Mackintosh, 2011;Rodriguez, Torres, Mackintosh & Chamizo, 2010). However, these studies were not about orientation, and therefore any claims about sex differences in reorientation ability are currently far from definitive.…”

Section: Section Summarymentioning

confidence: 79%

“…More important, it represents a challenge to any viable comprehensive theory, which must be able to account in precise quantitative terms for the pattern of effects, and make novel predictions. An interesting direction for future research has been indicated by recent studies on rodents which suggest that cue interaction (blocking, overshadowing, and facilitation) between geometry and features might be modulated by sex because male and female rats tend to assign different weights to these cues (Rodriguez, Chamizo, & Mackintosh, 2011;Rodriguez, Torres, Mackintosh, & Chamizo, 2010); this should be explored in additional species.…”

Section: Facilitation and Interference Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Two fields are better than one: Developmental and cognitive perspectives on underatnding spatial reorientation

Twyman¹,

Nardi²,

Newcombe³

2013

CCBR

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Occasionally, we lose track of our position in the world, and must re-establish where we are located in order to function. This process has been termed the ability to reorient and was first studied by Ken Cheng in 1986. Reorientation research has revealed some powerful cross-species commonalities. It has also engaged the question of human uniqueness because it has been claimed that human adults reorient differently from other species, or from young human children, in a fashion grounded in the distinctive combinatorial power of human language. In this chapter, we consider the phenomenon of reorientation in comparative perspective, both to evaluate specific claims regarding commonalities and differences in spatial navigation, and also to illustrate, more generally, how comparative cognition research and research in human cognitive development have deep mutual relevance.

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Section: Section Summarymentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Facilitation and Interference Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two fields are better than one: Developmental and cognitive perspectives on underatnding spatial reorientation

Twyman¹,

Nardi²,

Newcombe³

2013

CCBR

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“…In males, geometry overshadowed landmark learning, but landmark learning did not overshadow learning about geometry, while in females, landmark learning overshadowed learning about geometry, but geometry learning did not overshadow landmark learning. It was the more discriminable, salient, or preferred source of information (geometry for males and landmark for females, as shown by Rodríguez et al, 2010) that overshadowed the less discriminable, salient, or preferred cue.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Hayward et al, who assessed salience on the basis of the performance of groups trained with each cue in isolation, found no evidence to support this. It remains to be seen whether the measure of salience employed by Rodríguez et al (2010)-namely, opposing the two cues and seeing which one wins-would have given the same result. An even more puzzling finding, from our point of view, is that McGregor et al (2009) found not only that landmarks did not overshadow geometry, but also that geometry failed to overshadow landmarks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is evidence, however, that males and females may differ in the extent to which they rely on geometry or landmarks when navigating (Roof & Stein, 1999;Williams, Barnett, & Meck, 1990; a similar sex difference in navigation tasks has been observed in humans-e.g., Chai & Jacobs, 2009;Saucier, Green, Leason, MacFadden, Bell & Elias, 2002). Consistent with this, Rodríguez, Torres, Mackintosh, and Chamizo (2010) trained rats in a triangular-shaped pool to find a hidden platform, whose location was defined in terms of two sources of information: one landmark next to the platform, but outside the pool, and one particular corner of the pool. Subsequent test trials without the platform pitted these two sources of information against one another.…”

Section: Estrous Cyclementioning

confidence: 92%

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Overshadowing and blocking between landmark learning and shape learning: the importance of sex differences

2011

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Rats were trained in a triangular-shaped pool to find a hidden platform that maintained a constant relationship with two sources of information, an individual landmark and one part of the pool with a distinctive shape. In Experiment 1, shape learning overshadowed landmark learning but landmark learning did not overshadow shape learning in males, while landmark learning overshadowed shape learning but shape learning did not overshadow landmark learning in females. In Experiment 2, rats were pretrained either with the single landmark relevant or with the shape relevant, in the absence of the alternative cue. Final test trials, without the platform, revealed reciprocal blocking only in females; in males, shape learning blocked landmark learning, but not viceversa (Experiment 2a). In Experiment 2b, male rats received a longer pretraining with the single landmark relevant, and now landmark learning blocked shape learning. The results thus confirm the claim that males and females partially use different types of spatial information when solving spatial tasks. These results also agree with the suggestion that shape learning interacts with landmark learning in much the same way as does learning about any pair of stimuli in a Pavlovian conditioning experiment.Keywords Overshadowing . Blocking . Sex differences . Landmark learning . Shape learning . Morris pool . Rats . Estrous cycleExperiments on spatial learning have suggested that rats may use a variety of different strategies or cues to find their goal. A common assumption in earlier studies in the Morris pool (Morris, 1981) was that rats use the landmarks outside the pool to find the submerged platform. A subsequent finding reported by Cheng (1986; see also Gallistel, 1990), using a foraging task, implied that rats can use geometric information to locate a hidden goal. He trained male rats in a rectangular arena, where the two short walls of the box and one of the long walls were black, while the other long wall was white. In addition, distinctive visual patterns were placed in each of the box's corners (as well as other nongeometric cues). Food was buried in one corner of the box, and the rats had to search for it. Although rats learned to search in the correct location for the food, they made frequent rotational errors, searching in the corner diagonally across from the one where the food was hidden. The only characteristic that the target corner and the corner diagonal from it shared in common was having one long wall to the left and one short wall to the right, which implies that the information provided by the nongeometric sources of information to find the food location did not seem to be important. Cheng concluded that the rats used the geometric framework of the box itself.The circular pool used by Morris (1981) does not provide much scope for using geometry to locate the hidden platform. But subsequent experiments by Pearce and his colleagues, employing rectangular, triangular, and kiteshaped pools, have shown that rats will indeed use the shape of ...

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The Relation Between Spatial and Nonspatial Learning

McGregor¹

2016

The Wiley Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning

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Sex differences in the strategies used by rats to solve a navigation task.

Cited by 41 publications

References 29 publications

Two fields are better than one: Developmental and cognitive perspectives on underatnding spatial reorientation

Two fields are better than one: Developmental and cognitive perspectives on underatnding spatial reorientation

Overshadowing and blocking between landmark learning and shape learning: the importance of sex differences

The Relation Between Spatial and Nonspatial Learning

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