Retention of ordinal position information with limited and extended serialtraining

To examine the possibility that position cues are temporal and therefore in effective early in serial runway training, rats were runway trained on a th ree-trial series of different rewards. The series was SNP1, where S and P-1 refer to series trials that concluded with four sucrose or eight plain Noy es pellets, respectively. The middle trial was never rewarded (N). Early in training, a significant pattern of running slowly on the middle trial and rapidly on the initial and terminal trials had emerged. Transfer tests to s eries of trials (NNN) never rewarded after this limited training (on Day 19 ) and later after extended training (Day 39), each gave evidence that the r ats relied upon position cues in the tests. The three-trial patterns establ ished before the tests were retained on the three trials of the NNN series. The results suggest the prevalence of position learning, but they work aga inst the idea that position cues are temporal and effective only with exten ded training.