Rat 15 was given one more session of the task after the day three of the dark phase. The session was conducted again in dark and this time with variable arena rotation speed. The speed switched between 0.71 rpm and 1.23 rpm every three minutes. Since dark phase with stable speed of rotation lasted only for three days, it was not possible to analyze a possible influence of variable speed of rotation. Nevertheless, the rat’s performance – maximum time of avoidance of 166 s – was worse than in previous sessions of the dark phase (202 s, 214 s, 646 s); even though, when the whole 30 minutes of the session were analyzed, maximum time of avoidance was 360 s. Worsening performance due to variable rotation speed would suggest use of a temporal strategy to avoid the to-be-avoided sector, but lower maximum time of avoidance may be caused by higher difficulty of avoidance during the higher arena rotation speed as well. Therefore, these data should be interpreted with caution. Five other subjects were also given one more session of the task in the dark. However, arena rotation speed remained stable for these subjects. The rats were chosen on the basis of average maximum time of avoidance during the dark phase and maximum time of avoidance in the third day of dark phase. Even though the rats were chosen because they showed some ability to avoid the to-be-avoided sector in the dark, their performance on the fourth day was no better than in previous days (mean maximum time of avoidance for these chosen subjects during the four sessions in dark was subsequently 111 s, 150 s, 137 s, 137 s). After 20 minutes of the task on the fourth day, shock was turned off and the behavior of the subjects was observed a further 10 minutes. The average percentage of time of the movement against the direction of arena rotation decreased from 11.8% to 6.6%, but it was still larger than the percentage of time of the movement in the direction of arena rotation (1.5% and 0.6% respectively). Even though, most of the subjects still moved against the direction of arena rotation, the absence of shock took away information about position within the room and the passive movement due to arena rotation predominated to active movement of a subject against the direction of arena rotation. The result corroborates a previous finding of importance of shock for orientation within a room in dark [30]. 30. Fajnerova I, Kenney J, Lobellova V, Okrouhlicova S, Stuchlik A, Klement D (2014) Can rats solve the active place avoidance task without the room-bound cues? Behav Brain Res 267: 126-32.