ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Experiment page > Editing and deleting treatment groups and animals > Add animals

Add animals

Overview

When you add new animals to an experiment which is in progress, ANY-maze may need to ask you where in the Test schedule you want the animals to be included.

Details

This is best explained by an example. Imagine you're performing a water-maze experiment in which you first train the animals to find an island and then treat them and test their ability to remember where the island is. Thus your experiment has two stages, let's call them Training and Retest.

Now imagine you've performed the Training and you've just started the Retest stage, at this point you add some more animals to the experiment.

What should ANY-maze do? Immediately go back to the Training stage so these new animals can get trained, or finish the Retest stage of the trained animals and only then go back to the Training stage to train the new animals? This is the question ANY-maze is asking you.

In fact what ANY-maze actually asks is whether you want the new animals to be inserted at the start or end of the test schedule. If you consider the above example, then it's probably clear that adding the new animals at the start of the schedule will mean that they'll be trained straight away, while adding them to the end means that the existing animals will finish their Retests before then new animals get trained - figures 2, 3 and 4 demonstrate this.

Figure 1. A very simple water-maze experiment - the animals have completed their training and are about to start the Retest stage.

Figure 2. Two new animals have been added to the experiment. In this case they've been added at the end of the test schedule.

Figure 3. Two new animals have been added to the experiment. In this case they've been added at the 'start' of the test schedule.

ANY-maze help topic T0757