The Object Location memory task: A test not suitable for use in mice?
C. Jacquot and H.J. Little
Department of Basic Medical Sciences: Pharmacology, St
George’s Hospital Medical School,
University of London, London, UK
The Object Location memory task is a behavioral test often used in rats
to assess their
spatial memory.
In this task, the animals are first familiarized with the position of
two identical objects during a sample phase. During the subsequent choice
phase, one object is maintained in its previous location while the other
is moved in a new location within the arena. Normal rats spontaneously
spend more time exploring the object in the novel location.
During a project assessing brain damage in mice caused by chronic alcohol
treatment,
we were interested to see if the spatial memory of these mice was affected.
This was
assessed using an object location memory task. The results showed that
normal animals
from the C57 mouse strain and from the TO mouse strain did not display
any differences
in exploration between an object that had been moved and an object that
was retained
in its original position. In order to examine this further, we repeated
the test in different
conditions: with a different arena, with a range of different objects,
with variation in the
delays between the sample and the choice phase (choice phase 15min, 2hr
or 5hr after the
sample phase), in different light conditions (normal light or dim red
light) or assessed by a
different experimenter. None of these changes resulted in differences
in exploration of an
object that had been moved, compared with one that remained in the same
location. Our
conclusion was that this test may not be suitable to assess spatial memory
in mice.
Paper presented
at Measuring Behavior 2005
, 5th International Conference on Methods and Techniques
in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The
Netherlands.
© 2005 Noldus
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