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A carryover effect is an effect of a previous treatment on a later response. Balanced transitions help prevent a treatment from being preceded disproportionately by one particular alternative, but do not ensure that carryover effects vanish or are separately identifiable in every model.

A crossover design assigns each subject a sequence of treatments in successive periods. Subject blocking can reduce between-subject variation; balanced sequences can separate treatment from period effects. A carryover effect or irreversible change can invalidate a simple within-subject comparison.

Use two crossed sets of blocks in experimental design: volunteers as rows and afternoons as columns. Volunteer blocks control persistent ability, drawing style and prior experience; afternoon blocks control conditions shared that day, including common task difficulty and general practice over time. Neither partition is nested in the other.

Give every volunteer each program twice, and use each program twice each afternoon. The row-column design is then balanced for both block systems. In the additive modelthe program contrasts are orthogonal to both centered block spaces. This controls additive volunteer and afternoon effects; it does not automatically eliminate individual learning differences or carryover effects.

Start with six program sequences: $ABCABC$, $ACBACB$, $BACBAC$, $BCABCA$, $CABCAB$ and $CBACBA$. This gives two appearances of each program per row and per column. It also balances transitions: each ordered pair of distinct programs occurs five times across all adjacent sessions.

Apply restricted randomization by randomly assigning the six sequences to the six volunteers and independently permuting the three program labels. Using the supplied numbers, rank the first six from smallest to largest: the sequence indices are $(4,1,5,2,3,6)$. Assign these, in order, to volunteers 1 through 6. Rank the next three numbers attached to symbols $(A,B,C)$: their order is $(B,C,A)$. Assign actual program labels $(A,B,C)$ to these ordered symbols, so base $A\mapsto C$, base $B\mapsto A$, base $C\mapsto B$. The final ready-to-use randomized row-column design is:

Programs retain their real identities after this label permutation. The researcher should follow the table across chronological afternoons; arbitrary column permutations are deliberately excluded so that transition balance survives. Each program receives twelve sessions and occurs twice in every block. Under the additive block model, the analysis of variance has row, column, program and residual statistical degrees of freedom $5,5,2,23$, respectively, besides the grand mean. Transition balance is useful against differential carryover effects, but is not a proof that they are absent.

Consider learning and memory of the maps. Repeating an identical map can improve later scores through recall rather than the assigned program, and a skill learned using one program can transfer to another. Provide comparable familiarization before recording responses and use new, difficulty-matched maps on later afternoons. If all volunteers face the same map on a given afternoon, common map difficulty is absorbed by the afternoon block.

The balanced transitions in the proposed row-column design help with first-order carryover effects, but general practice, higher-order memory and program-dependent learning may still require an explicit interaction term or carryover effect in the analysis. Merely applying randomization to treatment labels cannot make these effects disappear.

A completely randomized design uses $2m$ eligible animals, randomly selecting $m$ to receive $P$ and assigning the remainder to $Q$. Use comparable follow-up and assess the same response variable in both groups. Its advantage is simplicity and freedom from previous-treatment carryover effects; its disadvantage is that between-animal variation enters the residual and can make a treatment contrast imprecise.

A randomized complete block design with matched pairs first forms $m$ pairs using pre-treatment characteristics such as initial disease severity, age or breed. Independently choose which animal in each pair receives $P$, with its partner receiving $Q$. The experimental units are animals; pairs are blocks. The average within-pair difference estimates the treatment contrast, and positive within-pair similarity can reduce its variance. Its advantage is control of known heterogeneity; its disadvantage is the need for useful matching, with fewer residual statistical degrees of freedom and little gain if the matching variables are uninformative. Do not construct pairs using outcomes observed after assignment.

A two-period crossover design randomly assigns half the animals to sequence $PQ$ and half to $QP$. Each animal receives both treatments in separate periods, with a scientifically justified interval between them and the same outcome assessment after each period. Animal blocks remove persistent between-animal differences, while the two sequences balance treatment against period. Its advantage is potentially high precision from within-animal comparisons; its disadvantage is vulnerability to carryover effects, changing disease state and irreversible effects. It is suitable only when comparing the treatments in both periods remains meaningful and residual effects of the first treatment are adequately controlled. A two-period crossover design does not by itself disentangle arbitrary treatment-specific carryover effects.