RADIAL MAZE

The eight armed radial maze is a common experimental setup in investigating spatial orientation and memory performance in rodents. Their task is to find the locations of food rewards at the end of some of the arms and to remember these locations for successive tests. Therefore visual cues beyond the bounds of the maze must be perceptible to the animal. Success and progression can be measured by evaluating the elaboration of strategy or by the time to pass the test. This maze is suitable for long-term-memory tests as well as working and reference memory tests. Diverse time parameters, sequence of arm visits and error scoring are the most important arguments recorded by the plug-in.

Radial Maze Plug-In makes full use of the Viewer capabilities and ads features like error validation and strategy detection. The analysis functions cover statistics on individual animals, on animal groups and comparisons between groups.File administration is terribly easy with this plug-in. You can pool experiment results and move, copy and delete single experiments from the result pools. Additionally results can be exported to handle them with other software like MS Excel, SPSS, OpenOffice Calc and more.Radial Maze result parameters we have already implemented. More and others are easy to add.

  • Locomotion speed – The animal’s averaged velocity over the whole experiment duration
  • Track length – The complete traveled distance
  • WME – Working Memory Error: repeated visit of a baited arm
  • RME – Reference Memory Error: wrong arm visit
  • WRME – Working Reference Memory Error: repeated visit of a wrong arm
  • Series – Succession of visited arms
  • Standardized series – The standardized series expresses the change from one arm to the next as angle. 0° stands for an immediate second visit of the same arm. 45° is a visit of the clockwise next neighbor, 180° is the opposite arm and 315° is the counterclockwise next neighbor

 

Parameters for each arm and the center:

  • Visit – There is a simple counter for each arm’s visits
  • Latency – For each arm the time until it was visited first
  • Duration – Total duration of stay in the zone
  • Headbobs – Exploration behavior of rats an mice
  • Headstretches – Exploration behavior of rats an mice

radial_maze-statundchart
Group comparison concerning wrong arm visits