Rats can learn a temporal task in a single session

Fixed interval, peak interval, and temporal bisection procedures have been used to assess cognitive functions and address questions such as how animals perceive, represent, and reproduce time intervals. They have also been extensively used to test the effects of drugs on behavior, and to describe the neural correlates of interval timing. However, those procedures usually require several weeks of training for behavior to stabilize. Here, we compared three types of training protocols and reported a procedure in which performance by the end of the very first session nearly matches the performance of long-term training. We also discuss this fast-learning protocol in terms of an information-theory approach. This one-day training protocol can be used to investigate temporal learning and may be especially useful to electrophysiological and neuropharmacological studies.