What is radial arm maze performance?
The Radial Arm Maze (RAM) was designed by Olton and Samuelson (1976) to measure spatial learning and memory in rats. It is an apparatus consisting of eight horizontal equidistantly spaced arms (usually 57 × 11 cm) radiating from a small circular central platform (30 cm in diameter) elevated (70 cm) off the floor.
What is the radial arm water maze?
The eight-arm radial water maze is designed to evaluate reference and working memory performance simultaneously by requiring subjects to use extra-maze cues to locate escape platforms and remedies the limitations observed in land based radial arm maze designs.
How do place cells work?
Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus that fire when an animal visits specific regions of its environment, called place fields, and are thought to provide the foundation for an internal representation of space, or ‘cognitive map’1,2.
Who invented the T-maze?
Robert Yerkes
The T-maze is a T-shaped apparatus allowing a choice between two opposite arms. A first T-maze apparatus was designed at the beginning of the 1910s by Robert Yerkes (1876–1956) at Harvard University for the study of invertebrate cognition, in particular learning processes in the earthworm5.
What is rat maze?
A rat starts from source and has to reach the destination. The rat can move only in two directions: forward and down. In the maze matrix, 0 means the block is a dead end and 1 means the block can be used in the path from source to destination. Note that this is a simple version of the typical Maze problem.
How do you calculate Y maze?
The entry is considered when all four limbs are within the arm. The alternation percentage is calculated by dividing the number of alternations by number of possible triads x 100. The maze is cleaned with Virkon solution between animals to eliminate odor traces.
What is the elevated zero maze?
The elevated plus maze (EPM) and elevated zero maze (EZM) are behavioral tests that are widely employed to assess anxiety-like behaviors in rats and mice following experimental manipulations, or to test the effects of pharmacological agents.
Whats the difference between place cells and grid cells?
Place cells fire whenever an animal occupies a specific location in its environment, with each place cell firing at a different spot. Grid cells generate virtual maps of the surroundings that resemble grids of repeating triangles.
What do place cells look like?
Relationship to grid cells It has been proposed that place cells are derivatives of grid cells, pyramidal cells in the entorhinal cortex. This theory suggests that the place fields of the place cells are a combination of several grid cells, which have hexagonal grid-like patterns of activity.
Can you improve working memory?
Rather than there being a set limitation, working-memory capacity could improve through practice–suggesting that those with working-memory problems could improve their capacities through repetition.
How do I test my mouse memory?
The Intellicage is an automated testing chamber used to test cognitive cognitive ability in socially housed mice. By attaching a satellite box to the chamber, an experimenter can also study exploratory behavior in a novel environment.
What is maze problem?
In this problem, there is a given maze of size N x N. The source and the destination location is top-left cell and bottom right cell respectively. Some cells are valid to move and some cells are blocked.
Who invented maze learning?
Most historians agree that the animal maze was first developed at Clark University in the late 1890s, in the laboratory of Edmund Sanford, PhD, in a study by his graduate student, Willard Small.
What is spatial working memory?
Spatial working memory entails the ability to keep spatial information active in working memory over a short period of time. To study the areas of the brain that are involved in spatial working memory, a group of stroke patients was tested with a spatial search task.
Are male or female mice more active?
Most rodent studies suggest that under normal conditions, females are more active than males.
What is the radial maze task?
The radial maze task was introduced by Olton and colleagues in 1975 as a measure of working memory for spatial information. The maze is illustrated in Figure 8. A food pellet is placed at the end of each arm.
Does the radial arm maze use distant visual cues to aid learning?
Unlike the Morris water maze and the Barnes maze, the radial arm maze does not use distant visual cues to aid spatial learning. Figure 2.9. Radial arm maze.
What type of memory does the radial arm maze measure?
The design of the maze ensures that the animal must return to the center between each arm visit and is therefore presented with the same 8 options each time, following which they must remember which choices have already been made. In this way, the radial arm maze measures two forms of memory known as “reference memory” and “working memory.”
How long does it take to train a radial arm maze?
This is a relatively difficult task for rodents, requiring several days or weeks to train rats and many weeks to train mice. Unlike the Morris water maze and the Barnes maze, the radial arm maze does not use distant visual cues to aid spatial learning.