1995 Volume 37 Issue 4 Pages 252-257
The present study examined the effects of food-deprivation and food-reward on the behavior of rats in the eight-arm radial maze. In the free-choice training, all of the four groups of rats, deprived-and-rewarded (DR), deprived-and-unrewarded (DU), nondeprived-and-rewarded (NR), and nondeprived-and-unrewarded (NU), made choice more efficiently than chance level, but the rats in DR made fewer errors than the other three groups. As for the choice patterns, all the groups showed the tendency to choose the arms 90° apart from the arms chosen just before. This tendency was shown most significantly in DR. These findings suggest that the efficient arm-choice behavior of rats is not determined by a simple effect of either food-deprivation or food-reward but by an interactive effect of these two factors.