A comparison of win-shift and win-stay performance of rats in a radial arm maze

The purpose of the present experiment was to compare the performance of rats in a win-shift task and a win-stay task in a radial arm maze. To this end, three experiments were conducted using a variety of procedures. In general, the win-shift task required the rats to choose the unvisited arms and the win-stay task required the rats to return the visited arms. In Experiment 1, a free-choice memory recognition procedure was used, and in Experiments 2 and 3, a forced-choice memory recognition procedure was used. All three experiments showed that in the win-shift task, rats rapidly learned the task and performed well whereas in the win-stay task, the rats consistently showed a chance-level performance despite of the prolonged training. In addition to these findings, when the tasks were reversed (i.e. from the win-shift to the win-stay, and vice versa), the rats still showed a response strategy previously adopted (Experiment 3). These findings seem to be important in considering the characteristics of spatial memory in rats.