BIO661 Practical 1 Dr Nur Nadiah Md Yusof FSG, UiTM, Shah Alam

BIO 661
PROBLEM BASED LEARNING (PBL)

SUBMISSION DATE: 25th JUNE 2020

LEARNING

Learning can be defined as a relatively permanent change in behaviour or potential for behaviour
that results from experience. The term “relatively permanent change” refers to some internal
process that change in the form of memory but there is no guarantee that the information can be
recalled for use. “Potential for behaviour” refers to the fact that some things can be learned that
are not used immediately or may never be used, that is they are latent or unexpressed.
“Experience” can be defined as all aspects of the environment of the organism in question. There
are many forms of learning that includes habituation, classical conditioning, sensitization and
operant conditioning.

Watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0zFXp3NR4U) to get the idea on how

maze experiment on mice is being done. Then read the following statement on the mice
experiment below and answer all the questions.

________________________________________________________________________

In an experiment to understand some aspects of learning in mice, a mouse which has not been
fed for 8 hours, were placed inside one end of a maze (Maze A) while some food pellets were
provided in front of the escape hole at the other end (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Once the mouse has reached the food pellets, it was then placed again at the starting point and
the experiment was repeated again to get a total of five trials. The time taken for the mouse
reached the food pellet/escape hole in each trial was recorded. After the end of the five trials in
BIO661 Practical 1 Dr Nur Nadiah Md Yusof FSG, UiTM, Shah Alam

Maze A, the same mouse was placed in another two different mazes (Maze B & Maze C), with
also five trials conducted in each maze.

The time taken for the mouse to complete each trial in all mazes are in the following table:

Maze A

Trial Time taken (s)

1 150
2 124
3 95
4 41
5 42

Maze B

Trial Time taken (s)

1 114
2 92
3 67
4 48
5 36

Maze C

Trial Time taken (s)

1 102
2 86
3 83
4 92
5 95

Questions

1. Draw a graph of no of trials versus time to show the relationship (for each maze).
2. From the data, discuss what do you think might have happened in Maze C.
3. What can you conclude from the experiment?
4. What sort of learning are you exposing the mice to? Explain the learning type.
5. Why is learning important to animals? Explain with respect to adaptive consequences.
BIO661 Practical 1 Dr Nur Nadiah Md Yusof FSG, UiTM, Shah Alam

1. Draw a graph of no of trials versus time to show the relationship (for each maze).

The relationship shown by line graph maze A indicating a nonlinear negative correlation as it is
a straight line that falls from left to right meaning that the time-taken (s) for mice to find food in
Maze A decreases as the number of trials done increases
.

The relationship shown by line graph maze B indicating a linear negative correlation as it is a
straight line that falls straight from left to right meaning that the time-taken (s) for mice to find
food in Maze B decreases as the number of trials done increases. It showed an inverse
relationship between the number of trials done versus the time taken of mice in Maze B to found
the food.
BIO661 Practical 1 Dr Nur Nadiah Md Yusof FSG, UiTM, Shah Alam

2. From the data, discuss what do you think might have happened in Maze C.

The relationship shown by line graph maze C indicating that there is a linear negative
correlation that happens from trial 1 till 3 then the pattern change into linear positive
correlation from trial 4 till 5. From the Data provided and the plotted line graph, we can
conclude that the mouse started to confuse all of the pathways in reaching food from Maze
A, B, and C.

Moreover, mice use spatial maps to guide their feeding patterns. The mice in this
experiment generally follow a foraging pattern as it started to memorize the pathway used to
reach food in both maze A and maze B. The pattern refers to the renewal time taken that
mice have acquired by doing the same experiment repeatedly 5 times. Thus, this
strengthens the theory in which spatial learning and memory did occur in mice.

As the same mice have been placed in Maze A and Maze B before being transferred to
Maze C, the short term memory from recognizing the pathways in both mazes to reach food
starts to mix up and affects the mice's learning ability. Mice remember where they have and
have not been for several hours so it can be said that in Maze C the time taken for mice to
get food getting faster as the mice had experience from before . Nonetheless, by the third
trial in Maze C, all of the past spatial learning starts to slowly disappearing hence making
the mice confused and lost it sense of direction causeing it to taken a longer time in finding
the food source.