Phase I: Pretraining
Rats are water deprived by removing their water for 23 h/day for 3 days. Next, water is randomly placed in half of the 426 wells on the Oasis maze platform (0.3 ml per well), and the rats are given 5 min to find and drink as much water as they can on 2 occasions, separated by 30 min. The next day this procedure is repeated with only 25% of the wells containing water. On the final day, only 5 of the wells contain water. Pretraining on this day ends when the rats locate and consume water from all 5 baited wells.
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