Sometimes mice find a platform, but ignore it and continue to swim or immediately jump off. I thought, can this be seen as a manifestation of learning? That in this case to consider latent time (the first finding of the platform or when the animal sits on it)? Especially interested in a mice study.
Thank you for answers!
The latency is indeed the time they need to reach the platform.
In our lab, we train the mice very well to stay on the platform until they are "rescued" by the experimenter. In the early training phases, we gently guide the mouse back to the platform and let it stay there for at least 10 sec. The task they need to learn is to go to the platform and wait to be removed from the pool. Ideally they should never jump off, so the latency time is easy to measure.
The escape latency can be the time taken to make first contact with the hidden platform for virtual and real-world analogs of the water maze. In these scenarios, such analogs will be applied toward assessing human subjects, and it is unnecessary to inform them to stay atop the platform for a specified period since data recording would be programmed to occur instantly upon first contact with the hidden platform (see, e.g., Zhong, Magnusson, etc al., 2017). The recording of escape latency can also be programmed to eliminate the times in which the subject is not moving or spinning on the spot to get a more accurate gauge of the time that the subject spent in active search - unconfounded by moments of deliberation or passive survey of the environment.
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