ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Testing > Stages > Editing a stage

Editing a stage

Introduction

You can edit absolutely everything related to a stage at any time, whether before, during or after the experiment. However, there are a few things to be aware of.

Points to note

Changing the test duration will, of course, only affect future tests. Thus, changing this value can result in the tests in a stage having different durations; this can make the analysis and interpretation of results rather complicated.

You can always increase the number of trials in a stage; however, this won't necessarily affect all the animals:

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New trials WILL be added for any animals which haven't started the following stage (if there is one). In this respect, an animal is deemed to have started a stage if it has completed at least one trial in the stage.

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New trials WON'T be added for any animals which have started the following stage (unless you have selected the option to Allow adjustments to completed stage in the stage's Stage end rules sub-element).

Note that a repercussion of this rule is that in some circumstances, the experiment can go back a stage. For example, consider the situation where all the animals have completed stage 1 and animal 1 has completed its first trial in stage 2. In this case, the next test to perform will be a stage 2 test, perhaps for animal 2. Now you add an extra trial to stage 1. Animal 1 WON'T receive this extra trial, because it's started stage 2, but the other animals WILL and the next test to perform will change to be a stage 1 test - probably for animal 2. In other words, the experiment will have gone back to stage 1.

You can't decrease the number of trials in a stage to fewer than the maximum number of trials any animal has actually had in the stage. For example, if you specify that stage 1 has 6 trials and so far you've tested animal 1 in four of them, then you could reduce the number of trials to 5 or 4, but not fewer than this - because animal 1 has actually had 4 trials already. If you try to reduce the number of trials too much, ANY-maze will simply tell you that the change isn't possible.

ANY-maze help topic T0409