BIOBSERVE - Radial Maze Plug-In

Radial Maze Plug-In

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

Group comparison concerning wrong arm visits


	If you have questions concerning this product, please don't hesitate to use the following e-mail address: viewer@biobserve.com

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