Development of path stereotypy in a single day in rats on a multiple-T maze.

Humans and animals trained on sequential reaction tasks show decreases in reaction time and increases in anticipatory movements even long after they have ceased to make errors. Humans show these changes even when they do not explicitly recognize that they performed a repeating sequence. We have developed a task which rats learn to perform error-free quickly, but in which they continue to show path-refinement on a single day. This task may enable the study of performance strategy changes occurring within a single day.