plot_strategies: Plot water maze strategies.

In Rtrack: Spatial Navigation Strategy Analysis

Plot water maze strategies.

Description

Plots the strategy usage for all groups.

Usage

plot_strategies(
  strategies,
  experiment,
  factor = NA,
  x.axis = "day",
  exclude.probe = FALSE,
  boundaries = NA,
  boundary.lwd = 1,
  legend = TRUE,
  screen = FALSE,
  layout = NULL,
  title = "Strategy usage for %%f",
  axis.titles = TRUE,
  margins = c(5, 4, 4, 8),
  ...
)

Arguments

strategies	The strategy calls as returned from call_strategy.
experiment	The experiment object as returned from read_experiment.
factor	The factor by which the data should be grouped. The default, NA, means that all data will be shown in one plot. Specifying a grouping factor will cause a separate plot to be generated for each group.
x.axis	The scale of the x axis. The default, "Day", will add a labelled axis with tick marks at each day. If this parameter is set to "Trial", then tick marks are added for each trial. If set to "none", then no x axis will be drawn.
exclude.probe	Should data from probe trials be excluded (see Details).
boundaries	Where should the boundaries between arena types be drawn (see Details).
boundary.lwd	The thickness of the boundaries. Default is 1.
legend	Should a legend be drawn. Default is to add a legend to the plot.
screen	Should multiple plots be drawn to one page. Default is FALSE. This can be useful for advanced layout using split.screen.
layout	If screen is TRUE, this parameter can be given as a matrix of indices or level names. The multiple sub-plots will be drawn in a grid in the order and layout specified.
title	Text for the plot title. The default includes the name of the factor and the level encoded as the wildcard " be replaced (for example for language localisation). Using the string " on its own will print the factor and level without additional text. The string "" will suppress the title entirely. Note that this overrides the usual plotting parameter 'main' (which would give the same title to all subplots).
axis.titles	Should axis titles be drawn. Default is to add titles for the x and y axes. These can be suppressed and added afterwards (using title). This might be helpful for localising to a different language for example.
margins	The margins of the plot (see the option mar in par). The defaults should usually be fine, but they can be overridden if, for example, factor names are very long.
...	Additional arguments to plot.

Details

The strategies returned by read_experiment can be shown in a summary plot. In these plots, the fraction of subjects utilising a particular strategy is shown for each day/trial. If a factor is provided, then one plot will be made for each level of the factor. To view data for mutliple factors, they will need to be collapsed into one composite factor for plotting using this function. If probe trials were used, these can be ignored (not plotted) as the strategy use in the absence of the goal will be somewhat different. For this to work, a column named "Probe" must be present in the experiment description spreadsheet and must contain the value "TRUE" for each probe trial.

Boundaries are drawn (as broken vertical lines) between different arena types (for example between acquisition and goal reversal phases of a Morris water maze experiment). By default, these are added between each unique arena definition. If this is not appropriate, then this can be overridden by providing the boundaries parameter with a matrix or data.frame with two columns for the day and trial number respectively. Multiple boundaries can be defined by entering the day and trial index into rows of this table. Use boundaries = NULL to suppress boundary lines altogether.

Value

A list of strategy call information.

Examples

# This function relies on data too large to include in the package.
# For a worked example, please see the vignette "Rtrack MWM analysis"
# in the online package documentation at
# https://rupertoverall.net/Rtrack/.

Rtrack documentation built on Aug. 23, 2025, 1:12 a.m.