I talked to a biologist once that was running experiments on mice in front of a particle accelerator. He was testing to see how well the mice responded to both

I talked to a biologist once that was running experiments on mice in front of a particle accelerator. He was testing to see how well the mice responded to both routine and unfamiliar tasks after receiving some level of dosage from the high energy particles (heavy ions I think). The mice usually responded to routine tasks as well as they had prior to the exposure but had much more trouble responding to the unfamiliar tasks. The theory was that the particles damaged the elastic parts of the brain more than the plastic parts, that the brain had more trouble forming new connections to solve problems but strong connections formed by training survived the exposure. The experiments were to study how space radiation may affect astronauts solve problems when confronted with less familiar or totally new ones.