Hi,

Iam trying to analyse experimental data that I have. The experiment is designed to assess the effect of a disease condition on spatial memory using mice. There are 3 groups - No disease (-ve control), Drug that mimics the disease (+ve control), Disease. The performance of mice (distance to target) is measured daily using 8 trials (with the target at a different position during each trial) and repeated over 7 days. There was no crossover between the groups- each mouse was assigned only to one of the 3 groups and subjected to the trials daily (i.e the study is nested?).

I want to analyse the effect of both trial and day on the groups and hopefully find that the disease and +ve control groups perform worse than the -ve control group over trials or days or both.

I think that I should use a repeated measures ANOVA with trial and day as within subject effects and group as between subject effects. In the results that come up with this analysis on SPSS, what should I look at to get the answer to my question ? There are different things like test of sphericity, tests of within subject effects , within subject contrasts, between subject effects etc..what do each of these mean in the context of my experiment?

I'm new to this field and hence the doubts!

Thanks!