ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Tests page > Running tests > After testing > Ending an animal's trials in a stage manually

Ending an animal's trials in a stage manually

Introduction

In a stage which includes multiple trials you may want to stop testing a specific animal before it has had the maximum number of trials. For example, in a training stage, you may wish to stop training the animals either after a maximum of 10 trials or when they achieve some type of training goal.

Details

In order to end the trials for an animal yourself, you need to ensure that you've checked the box labelled Allow the user to specify when an animal should stop having trials in this stage, or whether an animal should skip the stage entirely which is shown on the Stage end rules settings page in the protocol.

How to end the trials in a stage:

Click the Animal number on the Test schedule report.

The Animal details report will open. Half way down this report is a section which shows the individual animal's Test schedule. At the end of the relevant stage you will see a link labelled End the xxx stage for this animal - see figure 1. Click the link. (NOTE: The link won't appear if the animal has already ended the stage - perhaps because it's had the maximum number of trials.)

All future trials for the animal will be removed from the schedule and the report will show the text Xxx stage ended for the following reason: User ended the stage.

Figure 1. If specified in the protocol, an animal's test schedule (which is part of the Animal details report) can include a link which will end the animal's trials in a particular stage.

Restarting a stage you ended manually

To restart a stage for an animal is almost identical to ending it (see above), only you'll click a link labelled Restart this stage for this animal. ANY-maze will automatically reschedule all outstanding trials for the animal.

Ending stages automatically

Although you can always end stages manually (provided you specified this option in the protocol - see above), there may be situations when ANY-maze could automatically detect your stage end criteria for you.

For example, in the water-maze you might want to train animals to find the island with 30 seconds in two consecutive trials. As ANY-maze obviously knows when an animal finds the island it could determine when an animal achieves this goal - this would save you from having to check for this following each trial of each animal.

To do this you can use Stage end rules, which are part of the stages element of the protocol. Of course, even if you're using stage end rules you can still end a stage manually if you need to.

ANY-maze help topic T0822