Editing Animal cognition (section)

====Methods====
As in humans, research with animals distinguishes between "working" or "short-term" memory from "reference" or long-term memory.  Tests of working memory evaluate memory for events that happened in the recent past, usually within the last few seconds or minutes.  Tests of reference memory evaluate memory for regularities such as "pressing a lever brings food" or "children give me peanuts".

=====Habituation=====
{{main|Habituation}}
This is one of the simplest tests for memory spanning a short time interval. The test compares an animal's response to a stimulus or event on one occasion to its response on a previous occasion.  If the second response differs consistently from the first, the animal must have remembered something about the first, unless some other factor such as motivation, sensory sensitivity, or the test stimulus has changed.

=====Delayed response=====
Delayed response tasks are often used to study short-term memory in animals.  Introduced by Hunter (1913), a typical delayed response task presents an animal with a stimulus such as colored light, and after a short time interval the animal chooses among alternatives that match the stimulus, or are related to the stimulus in some other way. In Hunter's studies, for example, a light appeared briefly in one of three goal boxes and then later the animal chose among the boxes, finding food behind the one that had been lighted.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Hunter WS | date = 1913 | title = The delayed reaction in animals and children | series = Behavior Monographs | volume = 2}}</ref> Most research has been done with some variation of the "delayed matching-to-sample" task. For example, in the initial study with this task, a pigeon was presented with a flickering or steady light. Then, a few seconds later, two pecking keys were illuminated, one with a steady light and one with a flickering light. The bird got food if it pecked the key that matched the original stimulus.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Blough DS | title = Delayed matching in the pigeon | journal = Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior | volume = 2 | issue = 2 | pages = 151–60 | date = April 1959 | pmid = 13801643 | pmc = 1403892 | doi = 10.1901/jeab.1959.2-151}}</ref>

A commonly-used variation of the matching-to-sample task requires the animal to use the initial stimulus to control a later choice between different stimuli. For example, if the initial stimulus is a black circle, the animal learns to choose "red" after the delay; if it is a black square, the correct choice is "green".  Ingenious variations of this method have been used to explore many aspects of memory, including forgetting due to interference and memory for multiple items.<ref name="Shettleworth" />

=====Radial arm maze=====
{{main|Radial arm maze}}
The [[radial arm maze]] is used to test memory for spatial location and to determine the mental processes by which location is determined.  In a radial maze test, an animal is placed on a small platform from which paths lead in various directions to goal boxes; the animal finds food in one or more goal boxes. Having found food in a box, the animal must return to the central platform.  The maze may be used to test both reference and working memory.  Suppose, for example, that over a number of sessions the same 4 arms of an 8-arm maze always lead to food. If in a later test session the animal goes to a box that has never been baited, this indicates a failure of reference memory.  On the other hand, if the animal goes to a box that it has already emptied during the same test session, this indicates a failure of working memory.  Various confounding factors, such as odor [[Sensory cue|cue]]s, are carefully controlled in such experiments.<ref>{{cite book | vauthors = Shettleworth SJ | date = 2010 | title = Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior | edition = 2nd | location = New York | publisher = Oxford University Press | isbn = 978-0-19-971781-1}}</ref>

=====Water maze=====
{{main|Morris water navigation task}}
The [[Water maze (neuroscience)|water maze]] is used to test an animal's memory for spatial location and to discover how an animal is able to determine locations. Typically the maze is a circular tank filled with water that has been made milky so that it is opaque. Located somewhere in the maze is a small platform placed just below the surface of the water. When placed in the tank, the animal swims around until it finds and climbs up on the platform. With practice, the animal finds the platform more and more quickly. Reference memory is assessed by removing the platform and observing the relative amount of time the animal spends swimming in the area where the platform had been located.  Visual and other cues in and around the tank may be varied to assess the animal's reliance on landmarks and the geometric relations among them.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Vorhees CV, Williams MT | title = Morris water maze: procedures for assessing spatial and related forms of learning and memory | journal = Nature Protocols | volume = 1 | issue = 2 | pages = 848–58 | year = 2006 | pmid = 17406317 | pmc = 2895266 | doi = 10.1038/nprot.2006.116}}</ref>

=====Novel object recognition test=====
The novel object recognition (NOR) test is an animal behavior test that is primarily used to assess memory alterations in rodents. It is a simple behavioral test that is based on a rodents innate exploratory behavior. The test is divided into three phases: habituation, training/adaptation and test phase. During the habituation phase the animal is placed in an empty test arena. This is followed by the adaptation phase, where the animal is placed in the arena with two identical objects. In the third phase, the test phase, the animal is placed in the arena with one of the familiar objects from the previous phase and with one novel object. Based on the rodents innate curiosity, the animals that remember the familiar object will spend more time on investigating the novel object.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Antunes M, Biala G | title = The novel object recognition memory: neurobiology, test procedure, and its modifications | journal = Cognitive Processing | volume = 13 | issue = 2 | pages = 93–110 | date = May 2012 | pmid = 22160349 | pmc = 3332351 | doi = 10.1007/s10339-011-0430-z | url =}}</ref>