ABSTRACT
During the past 20 years, behavioral neuroscientists have shown increasing interest in studying working memory, memories for information that is situation or trial dependent. Accordingly, several variations of delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) (Blough, 1959; Dunnett, Evenden, & Iversen, 1988; Mishkin & Delacour, 1975; Parkinson & Elsmore, 1989; Roitblat, 1980) and other trial-dependent tasks, including the radial arm maze tasks (Beatty & Shavalia, 1980; Olton & Samuelson, 1976), the working memory version of the Morris water maze task (Morris, 1984), the platform with holes tasks (Barnes, 1979; Oades & Isaacson, 1978; van der Staay, Kretching, Blokland, & Raaijmakers, 1990), novel object exploration (Ennaceur & Delacour, 1988), and others have been developed . Although all of these tasks require the use of trial-dependent information, they differ with respect to what the subject must remember, the motor demands that are made on the subject, the source of motivation and reinforcement, and how readily they can be acquired.
