ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Results page > Viewing results as track plots > Limiting the tests included in a track plot report

Limiting the tests included in a track plot report

In brief

By default, a track plot report will include all the tests performed in an experiment. However, you will often want to reduce this, as such a report will tend to be rather large. For example, you might want to look at plots for just a couple of treatments, or perhaps just for a water-maze probe trial.

To actually choose which tests are included you should use the list shown at the bottom of the Track plot report settings page - see figure 1.

Figure 1. The list of measures used to limit the tests included in a track plot report.

Details

The list includes various measures - clicking a measure's name expands the list to show the individual values of the measure. For example, one of the measures listed is Treatment - clicking it will show a list of the experiment's treatments - see figure 2.

Figure 2. In this case the report will just include those tests performed on animals which received the treatments 'Saline' or 'Compound X 1.0 mg/kg'.

To limit the tests, you should select items you want included - for example, in figure 2 the report will include all the tests performed on animals which received the treatments 'Saline' OR 'Compound X 1.0 mg/kg'. Note that if you want to include all the treatments then you don't need to select any of them at all; i.e. selecting nothing in a group is the same as selecting everything.

You can choose to limit the tests based on more than one measure - for example you could also open the Trial measure and select just the Re-test trial. In this case only the tests which match the selected treatments AND the selected trials will be included. So, in our example, just the Re-test trials performed on animals which received the treatments 'Saline' OR 'Compound X 1.0 mg/kg' would be included in the report.

If you want to select a block of items within the same group then you can use a 'shift-click' as follows: Click the first item you want to select, then hold down the shift key on the keyboard and click the last item you want to select. All the items from the first to the last (inclusive) will change to the same state as the LAST item now has. This works whether you're selecting or deselecting items - all the items simply change to have the same state as the LAST item you click.

Note that if you don't select anything at all in this list, then all tests will be included.

Selecting trials

Limiting the tests to just those which match certain trials can be a little less obvious than it appears - this is best explained by an example.

Imagine you have a water-maze experiment in which you train the animals to find an island, then treat them and then test them again to see whether the treatment has affected their ability to find the island. In this experiment you would probably be most interested in the results of the post-treatment tests and perhaps the last training tests (which you could use for comparison). However, the earlier training tests would be of little actual interest. So you would want to compare the Last training trial and treated trial. But what is the Last training trial? For some animals it might have been trial 3, for others trial 4 etc. depending on how quickly they learnt the task. For this reason, when listing the Trials in a stage, ANY-maze includes not just the individual trials (trial 1, trial 2, etc.) but also Last trial which will match the last trial for each animal, irrespective of which trial it happened to be. (For obvious reasons the Last trial isn't listed for stages which consist of just a single trial).

Excluding retired animals

As you may know, ANY-maze allows you to mark an animal as Retired. This means that the results of any tests the animal has already had are maintained, but the animal doesn't receive any further tests.

Retiring animals is common in experiments which include some type of training - animals which fail to achieve the training goal are retired.

Ordinarily, tests performed on retired animals are still included in reports, but you can choose to exclude them by checking the box shown at the bottom of the settings page titled Don't include results for retired animals in the report.

The Clear report settings button in the ribbon bar can be used to reset all the report settings back to their defaults, which includes removing all selections from the list of filters.

ANY-maze help topic T0859