Blocking in the spatial domain

An initial series of experiments with rats in a swimming pool established that they could find a hidden platform the location of which was defined in terms of 3 or 4 landmarks and that, when trained with all 4, any subset of 3 (or even, after a sufficient number of swimming trials, 2) landmarks was sufficient to produce accurate performance. When only one landmark was present during testing, however, performance fell to chance. Two additional experiments demonstrated a significant blocking effect: If rats were first trained to locate the platform with 3 landmarks, they did not learn to use a 4th landmark added to their initial set of 3.