Consistency of cognitive performance in spatial navigation and its link to activity and boldness in laboratory rats

Even though cognitive testing in animals is widespread, many issues remain open – for example the influence of behavioural parameters on cognitive performance, stability of cognitive performance upon repeated testing, or comparability of cognitive variables across different tasks (i.e. cross-contextual consistency). In this study we tested thirty six male Long Evans laboratory rats and assessed their cognitive performance in two standard tasks of spatial navigation – Active allothetic place avoidance and Morris water maze test. Using multivariate analyses, we detected different aspects of cognition within these complex tasks (the ability to learn fast, cognitive flexibility, general ability to solve a task successfully). We found that consistency of cognitive performance in these two tasks (estimates of cognitive repeatability) differed substantially, reflecting differences in the experimental procedures. Moreover, we inspected cognitive performance of the animals in more detail by creating a correlation matrix of factors derived from these procedures. Nevertheless, we found no correlation and therefore no indication of a general cognitive ability in spatial navigation using these two tasks. In addition, we found no link between personality and cognition when correlating cognitive performance of the animals with parameters from personality tests, which were derived from a previous study conducted on the same animals. These findings highlight a task-dependent nature of cognitive performance in these two tasks of spatial navigation and suggest that general cognitive ability in spatial navigation may not be reliably inferred from these two tasks, while also indicating no evident link between cognition and personality in this context.