(Democrats, who wanted a quick trial, objected to this idea).
To control for general cognitive functioning, we investigated the effects of the (putative) anxiolytic pre-treatment in a one trial object recognition test in both strains as well.
Patients were able to 'opt-out' of the feedback to the physician, however no participants in this small trial objected to having their results forwarded to the physician.
During this trial, Object A and Object B are placed in the open field, and the times tA and tB that the animal takes to explore the two objects are recorded.
The results, shown in Figure 4, demonstrate a striking modulation of perceived left/right orientation in the horizontal axis trials: objects on the left side of the array are twice as likely to be seen as viewed from the right as objects on the right side of the array (50% more likely for the single cube condition).
That is, in some grounding trials, objects had been referred to by their location (e.g., "top left"), potentially generating interactive memory traces for that object, yet without a naming precedent (see Fig. 1, Panel A, right, middle panel).
There was, however, a significant crossover interaction (F1,10 = 11.7, p = 0.007), indicating that for easy trials, objects were faster than features, but that this pattern reversed for difficult trials.
It was found that after multiple familiarisation trials, objects could now successfully be recognised as familiar by rats with perirhinal cortex lesions, both following a 90-min delay (the longest delay tested) and when object recognition was tested in the dark after familiarisation trials in the light.
Towards the goal of an animal model of human episodic memory we designed an three-trial object exploration task in which different versions of the novelty-preference paradigm were combined to subsume (a) object recognition memory, (b) the memory for locations in which objects were explored, and (c) the temporal order memory for object presented at distinct time points.
