Copy rats: Learning by observation during a foraging task by rats.

In two experiments, rats observed expert foragers in a laboratory foraging task. In both experiments, 12 towers with a food cup on top of each tower were placed in a circle. Six towers, marked with black and white stripes, had cups baited with cheese, and were located in randomly selected positions on successive trials.

Rats (Rattus norvegicus) flexibly retrieve objects' non-spatial and spatial information from their visuospatial working memory: effects of integrated and separate processing of these features in a missing-object recognition task.

After being trained to find a previous missing object within an array of four different objects, rats received occasional probe trials with such test arrays rotated from that of their respective three-object study arrays. Only animals exposed to each object's non-spatial features consistently paired with both its spatial features (feeder's relative orientation and direction) in the first experiment or with only feeder's relative orientation in the second experiment (Fixed Configuration groups) were adversely affected by probe trial test array rotations. This effect, however, was less persistent for this group in the second experiment but re-emerged when objects' non-spatial features were later rendered uninformative.