Abstract
A modified Hill maze, which consisted of four selection boxes arranged in a rotating style, was used to investigate rats' serial learning. Four rats were trained to master a three-item series including three distinctive objects presented simultaneously in each selection box. All rats learned to choose the objects in a prescribed order (A-B-C). After rats learned their series reliably, novel spatial arrangements of the item objects were introduced as a test for a response chaining strategy. In spite of these spatial changes of the items, their performance for the novel arrangements was maintained at exactly the same level of accuracy as for the original arrangements. The results suggest that rats learned the three-item series not based on response chaining, and that the modified version of Hill maze is a useful tool to investigate rats' serial learning.
