Which best summarizes the results of Tolman’s latent learning experiment?

(C) The rats that never received reinforcement completed the maze fastest.

In Tolman’s latent learning experiment, three groups of rats ran a maze for the same number of trials. The rats in one group were reinforced every time they finished the maze, a second group was never reinforced, and a third group was not reinforced during the first half of the trials but was reinforced during the second half of the trials. Tolman found the third group’s performance initially resembled the performance of the group that was never reinforced but quickly and dramatically improved once a reward was introduced and ultimately looked like the performance of the group that had been reinforced on every trial. Tolman argued that this improvement in performance illustrated that the rats had learned during the first half of the trials even though they did not evidence it until a reward was made available to them; he termed this type of learning latent learning.