Measuring Behavior 2005: Stuchlik et al.

Application of variants of the Place Avoidance task as alternatives to the Morris Water Maze in the study of spatial cognition in rodents

A. Stuchlík and J. Bures

Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech republic

Place navigation ranks among the most commonly studied types of behaviour. Traditionally, spatial orientation was widely investigated using the Morris water maze. Recently we developed several variants of the place avoidance paradigm, a dry-land test which can serve as an alternative to the classical Morris water maze. In the place avoidance task, an animal walks over the circular arena and is required to avoid an unmarked prohibited sector, entering of which is punished by a mild footshock. The prohibited sector can be defined in the coordinate frame of the room or in the frame of arena, which may rotate, or in both frames simultaneously (double avoidance). It was demonstrated that animal paralelly creates separate and autonomous representations of the arena and room coordinate frames, when it is required to avoid a room frame-fixed sector on the stable arena. A recently designed Active Allothetic Place Avoidance (AAPA) task (a modification of the place avoidance paradigm) was demonstrated to be sensitive to unilateral hippocampal inactivation and thus to require greater hippocampal integrity than the Morris water maze. In the AAPA, animal has to separate spatial stimuli from the environment into coherent representations of the room and arena frames and to navigate according to the room frame while ignoring the arena frame. Recent results obtained using the AAPA task will be presented in detail.

This work was supported by GACR grants No. 309/03/P126 and No 309/03/0715 and by MSMT project 1M0002375201.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.