Motivation: its effect on the solution strategy of the octogonal maze

Abstract

Animals develop diverse strategies to obtain food. Olton's octogonal maze constitutes an appropiate instrument to study the strategies used by rats to locate food. It requires short term memory or working memory, as S has to retain information to complete its task with an errless performance. an error consists of entering an already visited arm.

The purpose of the present experiment was to study the strategy used by three strains of rats, albino, gray and hooded, to locate food under two different conditions of motivation. one group was deprived of food until it reached 84% of its initial weight, the other until reached 75%.

Based on previous results obtained in our laboratory we expected the less motivated rats (84%) to behave as described in the literature, that is, to enter the alleys haphazardly guided by distant visual alocentric cues. In the more deprived group, we expected the rats to use in tralaberynthic egocentric and propioceptive cues. This strategy should be more effective as rats, when entering systematically the adjacent arm, make less errors.