ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Testing > Stages > Setting up a stage > Specifying the order in which animals will be tested

Specifying the order in which animals will be tested

In brief

When a stage contains more than one trial, you can choose the order in which the animals will be tested within the stage. There are three options, which appear on the stage's settings page, and they're described in detail below. For a stage which contains just one trial, it doesn't make any difference which option you choose.

Normally, ANY-maze will complete one stage for all the animals before it moves on to the next one. However, you may want to create a protocol in which each animal will proceed through all the stages before the next animal is tested. If this is the case, then you should check the box on the Settings page which is displayed when the Stages... element is selected in the protocol list.

Details

In simple terms, animals will be tested within a stage in numerical order. That's to say that animal 1 will be tested first, then animal 2, etc. However, when a stage contains more than one trial, there's the question of how this basic order should be applied to the repeated trials. Essentially, there are two possibilities:

The animals are all tested in their first trial before any of them start their second trial. For example, with 6 animals and 2 trials, this could be represented as a testing schedule of:

Test 1

Animal 1, trial 1

Test 2

Animal 2, trial 1

Test 3

Animal 3, trial 1

Test 4

Animal 4, trial 1

Test 5

Animal 5, trial 1

Test 6

Animal 6, trial 1

Test 7

Animal 1, trial 2

Test 8

Animal 2, trial 2

Test 9

Animal 3, trial 2

Test 10

Animal 4, trial 2

Test 11

Animal 5, trial 2

Test 12

Animal 6, trial 2

Each animal is tested in all of its trials before the next animal is tested. For example, with 6 animals and 2 trials, this could be represented as a testing schedule of:

Test 1

Animal 1, trial 1

Test 2

Animal 1, trial 2

Test 3

Animal 2, trial 1

Test 4

Animal 2, trial 2

Test 5

Animal 3, trial 1

Test 6

Animal 3, trial 2

Test 7

Animal 4, trial 1

Test 8

Animal 4, trial 2

Test 9

Animal 5, trial 1

Test 10

Animal 5, trial 2

Test 11

Animal 6, trial 1

Test 12

Animal 6, trial 2

However, ANY-maze includes a third possibility, which effectively mixes these two by grouping the animals. Within each group, the animals are all tested in the first trial before any of them start the second trial; however, the second group will only start to be tested after the first group has completed all their trials. For example, with 6 animals in groups of 3 and 2 trials, this could be represented as a testing schedule of:

Test 1

Animal 1, trial 1

Test 2

Animal 2, trial 1

Test 3

Animal 3, trial 1

Test 4

Animal 1, trial 2

Test 5

Animal 2, trial 2

Test 6

Animal 3, trial 2

Test 7

Animal 4, trial 1

Test 8

Animal 5, trial 1

Test 9

Animal 6, trial 1

Test 10

Animal 4, trial 2

Test 11

Animal 5, trial 2

Test 12

Animal 6, trial 2

This might seem a rather esoteric way of organising your testing, but it can be very useful, particularly if you have large numbers of animals in an experiment.

Animal treatments and test order

A point which sometimes causes confusion in ANY-maze is the relationship between testing order and treatment. This usually arises when you're used to thinking about your test schedule in terms of treatments, for example:

Test 1

Drug A animal

Test 2

Drug B animal

Test 3

Drug C animal

Test 4

Drug A animal

Test 5

Drug B animal

Test 6

Drug C animal

This view of a test schedule is clearly important, because in most experiments you will want to ensure that the treatments are spread evenly across time. In ANY-maze, then, because animals are always tested in numerical order (subject to multi-trial issues described in the previous section), the issue is really one of which treatment each animal will receive. For example, if animal 1 receives treatment A, animal 2 treatment B, animal 3 treatment C, animal 4 treatment A etc. then the schedule will be the same as the one shown above.

This, of course, begs the question 'How do I control the treatments which the animals receive?' and this is something that's defined at the start of the protocol using the Treatment groups element.

Limits

If you choose to group animals, then the group size must be between 2 and 99 animals - a group of 1 not being a group at all.

ANY-maze help topic T0395