Authors
Berta Sunyer, Sudarshan Patil, Harald Höger, and Gert Lubec
Summary
Carol Barnes developed a dry-land maze test for spatial learning and memory in 1979 where animals escaped from a brightly lit, exposed circular open platform surface to a small dark recessed chamber located under one of the 18 holes around the perimeter of the platform. Although it was initially invented for rats, the Barnes maze (BM) has become more popular to assess spatial memory in mice, taking advantage of their superior abilities to find and escape through small holes.1-4 Visual cues are required to optimize cognitive performance in the BM5-7. Pompl and co-workers showed better performance in mice tested with intra- and extra-maze cues than mice trained with no spatial cues present. Moreover, rodents with hippocampal damage showed impaired performance in the BM, supporting the spatial nature of the task8-11. The BM has similarities to the Morris Water Maze and to the radial-arm maze task, but no strong aversive stimuli or deprivation is being used as reinforcement. Instead, weak aversive stimulation may be applied to increase the motivation to escape from the circular platform (e.g., buzzer, light, fan)6,7,9,12,13. Strong aversive stimuli (i.e. water or shock) are likely to produce stress in the animal, influencing the performance in the task14,15. Mostly reference memory and working memory has been studied using the BM with different protocols. Here we propose a protocol to study short-term and long-term reference memory in the mice.Further details
The protocol was published on Protocol Exchange in 2007. To see the entire protocol, click on the source link.Advertisement
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