As the other responders noted, the Morris water task (technically not a maze) is the predominant task used to understand spatial memory in rats. However, there are many additional tasks and mazes that are still proliferate today. I'll add the T-maze/Y-maze to the list as David Tank's group at Princeton is doing some phenomenal work with virtual T-mazes right now.
Really, it comes down to what about spatial memory you want to address. Spatial memory - especially in behavioural neuroscience - is a very wide topic and many models have been developed to understand how it operates. One large distinction is between allocentric and egocentric memory systems. Allocentric spatial memory is generally thought to underlie landmark based navigation and has been localized primarily to the medial temporal lobes, especially to the signalling properties of place cells in the hippocampus. Egocentric spatial memory is generally thought to underlie path integration and has been localized to parts of the parietal cortex, although we have some new models that suggest grid cells located mainly in the entorhinal cortex are the basis of path integration abilities. This distinction between landmark-based spatial memory or egocentric spatial memory is a good starting point to try to focus your interest into the best task.
If you're interested in a more comprehensive, albeit accessible, summary of spatial tasks in behavioural neuroscience and what they've told us so far, check our Paul Dudchenko's book Why People Get Lost. It's about humans, but does a good job at summarizing the history of spatial memory using animal models.
This answer and the link provided below should be of great help.
Morris Water-maze replaced David Olton's Radial Maze as the pre-eminent Spatial memory task, largely because of the speed of which learning and memory can be assessed. Similarly, the conditioned place preference has replaced the water-maze for popularity of assaying new pharmaceutical compounds for the same reason. However, each of the tasks has multiple protocols, and variants that can tease out various aspects of navigational memory. ie spatial working memory, reference memory, acquisition, fear conditioing etc...
Can check out the article on the Hippocampus, and the learning tasks that test its navigational learning and memory function on my Page O' Neuroplasticity. The article covers the original water-maze and radial-maze literature and provides the full references through links, plus illustrations.
http://www.pageoneuroplasticity.com/
Cheers
As the other responders noted, the Morris water task (technically not a maze) is the predominant task used to understand spatial memory in rats. However, there are many additional tasks and mazes that are still proliferate today. I'll add the T-maze/Y-maze to the list as David Tank's group at Princeton is doing some phenomenal work with virtual T-mazes right now.
Really, it comes down to what about spatial memory you want to address. Spatial memory - especially in behavioural neuroscience - is a very wide topic and many models have been developed to understand how it operates. One large distinction is between allocentric and egocentric memory systems. Allocentric spatial memory is generally thought to underlie landmark based navigation and has been localized primarily to the medial temporal lobes, especially to the signalling properties of place cells in the hippocampus. Egocentric spatial memory is generally thought to underlie path integration and has been localized to parts of the parietal cortex, although we have some new models that suggest grid cells located mainly in the entorhinal cortex are the basis of path integration abilities. This distinction between landmark-based spatial memory or egocentric spatial memory is a good starting point to try to focus your interest into the best task.
If you're interested in a more comprehensive, albeit accessible, summary of spatial tasks in behavioural neuroscience and what they've told us so far, check our Paul Dudchenko's book Why People Get Lost. It's about humans, but does a good job at summarizing the history of spatial memory using animal models.
MWM works with two things which drives the animal to perform viz. hunger and aversion towards getting wet, I personally feel that these stressful stimuli will be a cognitive load, and hence I would like to go with just hunger and lot less stressful environment to assess spatial memory. Corticosterone will also increase
I found the answer of Aiden Arnold really well centered. Another important paradigm didn't cite yet in this discussion is the Ken Cheng's reorientation paradigm. It is very basic memory task, subjects are called to search for food or other rewards (ie a toys for toddlers) after they are disoriented and the target is hidden. It is an allocentric task based primarily on simple categorical (ie sense relationships such as "left/right"), rather than coordinate (ie exact euclidean distance) information.
In addition to the radial arm and Morris water maze, there is the maze created by Carol Barnes and colleagues. http://www.nature.com/protocolexchange/protocols/349
Be careful in constructing the radial arm maze if you use it. There must be plexiglass doors to restrain the rats for a few seconds in order to make sure that they are using a mnemonic strategy (in other words to keep them on the center platform for a short time). It helps to handle the rats before training on RAM and T mazes to reduce their fear levels (this takes several sessions).
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