Six classic water maze mistakes

Everyone makes at least one of these. Here's how to dodge them.

• Trusting latency alone. It can improve through circling or chaining, with no map involved.
• Ignoring swim speed. A slower group can look impaired when it isn't.
• Forgetting the floaters. Some animals just float. Measure it.
• Moving the cues. A shifted poster, or a wandering experimenter, breaks the map.
• Too few probes. One probe can miss the shape of the learning curve.
• One sex only. Recent ageing studies keep finding sex differences.

Further reading

• How to identify water maze search strategies