Diferentes Estrategias de Aprendizaje Espacial en Tortugas Reveladas Mediante un Procedimiento de Inversion en un Laberinto Radial‪.‬

ABSTRACT Different Spatial Learning Strategies in Turtles Revealed by a Reversal Procedure in a Plus Maze. Previous experiments suggest that turtles employ different spatial learning and memory strategies. These different strategies could present particular behavioral characteristics and could be based in separate neural systems. In the present work turtles' performance was analyzed in the reversal of a place and a cue procedure to examine further behavioral characteristics of these different learning systems. Data revealed that animals in the place task did not show any difference in the reversal procedure compared with the acquisition period. In contrast, animals in the cue procedure showed an impaired performance in the reversal of the task. In this sense, the numbers of errors in this group increased during the reversal learning relative to acquisition level. These results suggest that the turtles trained in the place procedure could be using a map-like relational strategy, by encoding the spatial relationship between the goal and the extramaze cues in an allocentric frame of reference. In contrast, turtles trained in the cue procedure could be solving the task by directly approaching the single individual intramaze cue associated to the goal as it were a beacon and largely ignoring the extramaze cues. Thus, the results of this experiment suggest that turtles are able to employ spatial strategies that closely parallel those described in mammals and birds.