Geometry learning while navigating: The importance of task difficulty and sex differences.

Cheng (1986) trained male rats to search for food in a rectangular arena that also contained distinctive visual patterns. He found that the rats used mainly the geometric framework of the box itself to find the food and claimed that geometrical information is processed in a specialized module, which is independent of feature information. The aim of the present set of experiments was to check if the previous results with male rats and an appetitive task could be extended to an aversive task while using both male and female rats and three-dimensional landmarks.