Honeycomb Maze Offers Significant Improvement Over Current Spatial Navigational Tests

Summary: Researchers have developed a new maze to help test spatial and navigational memory. The new honeycomb maze is a significant improvement over the standard Morris Water Maze, researchers report.

Source: Sainsbury Wellcome Center.

A powerful new tool for the study of spatial memory was today described in Nature as a significant improvement over the current gold standard, the Morris Water Maze. The novel Honeycomb Maze design allows for systematic analysis of the decisions an animal makes during navigation.

Spatial navigation tasks are used to study the way animals identify their location and navigate towards favourable, and away from unfavourable, locations in response to changes in the environment.

Professor John O’Keefe of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, and 2014 Nobel laureate for the discovery of place cells, a class of neurons important for spatial sense, commented on the achievement:

“The resources of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the UCL Biosciences mechanical workshop have enabled us to develop a new maze which has been in the planning and development stages for more than a decade during which we have tried out different technologies and tested different configurations.”

The Honeycomb Maze was intentionally designed to overcome the drawbacks of other tests for spatial navigation and memory such as the T- or Y-maze, Olton radial arm maze, Barnes maze and Morris Water Maze. Professor O’Keefe describes the novel spatial navigation task:

“The Honeycomb Maze consists of 37 individually-movable platforms, which enables the confinement of an animal to a localised space anywhere in the maze and forces it to choose between two alternative paths to the goal. By choosing the path with the lesser deviation from the goal-heading direction, the animal shows that it knows where the goal is and the best route to get there.”

“The Honeycomb Maze replicates all the advantages of the justly-famous Morris Water Maze in that it forces the animal to approach a hidden goal from different directions, ruling out non-hippocampal-dependent strategies. In addition, by forcing the animal to choose between two alternatives, it provides a simple measure of success at each point in the maze.” Professor O’Keefe continued.

The paper compares results from both control animals and hippocampal-lesioned animals completing a navigational task on the Honeycomb Maze and the factors affecting their performance.

Firstly, the team demonstrate both the consistency and reproducibility of the novel test through three control groups of male Lister hooded rats. The control rats learn very quickly and the study shows three main variables that affect performance:

  • The angle between the two choice platforms – performance improves for greater angles
  • Distance from the goal – performance deteriorates with increased distance
  • The angle between the correct platform and the goal – performance declines with an increase in the angle between the best choice platform and the goal

The researchers then describe a further experiment with hippocampal-lesioned animals and show the animals were both significantly deficient in learning the task and also took longer to make choices.

In addition, the Honeycomb Maze enables researchers to study the correlation of spatial navigation performance with the activity of place cells in the hippocampus where there is a map of an animal’s location in space.

honeycomb maze
A platform in the Honeycomb maze. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Sainsbury Wellcome Center.

Speaking about the importance of the Honeycomb Maze, Professor O’Keefe said “we see the maze as a general-purpose behavioural testing apparatus, which will enable us to study other spatial behaviours such as direction-following as well as non-spatial tasks such as approaching a moving object.”

“These are exciting times in systems neuroscience. Recent developments in electrophysiological and optical recording techniques permit us to simultaneously monitor the activity of large numbers of single units, opening up numerous possibilities for correlating patterns of neural activity with mental phenomena such as thoughts, intentions and emotions.”

“In parallel, the development of optogenetic techniques for manipulating the activity of brain cells has made possible the demonstration of a causal relationship between these neural patterns and the associated mental activity. Complementary development has taken place in the area of behavioural technologies. The use of virtual reality in the head-fixed mouse has opened up the possibility of controlling behaviour in a limited domain of experience such as navigating in a virtual corridor or choosing a particular visual stimulus.”

Professor O’Keefe concluded:

“The resources of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the UCL Biosciences mechanical workshop have enabled us to embark on a programme to develop more naturalistic, ethologically-relevant tasks where we can still monitor and control the animal’s behaviour.”

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: The study was funded by Wellcome, Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Medical Research Council, Royal Society, Kavli Foundation, Isaac Newton Trust, Cambridge, Biomedical Research Centre.

Source: April Cashin-Garbutt – Sainsbury Wellcome Center
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Sainsbury Wellcome Center.
Original Research: Abstract in Nature.
doi:10.1038/nature25433

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Sainsbury Wellcome Center “Honeycomb Maze Offers Significant Improvement Over Current Spatial Navigational Tests.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 25 January 2018.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/honeycomb-maze-navigation-8372/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Sainsbury Wellcome Center (2018, January 25). Honeycomb Maze Offers Significant Improvement Over Current Spatial Navigational Tests. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved January 25, 2018 from https://neurosciencenews.com/honeycomb-maze-navigation-8372/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Sainsbury Wellcome Center “Honeycomb Maze Offers Significant Improvement Over Current Spatial Navigational Tests.” https://neurosciencenews.com/honeycomb-maze-navigation-8372/ (accessed January 25, 2018).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]


Abstract

The honeycomb maze provides a novel test to study hippocampal-dependent spatial navigation

Here we describe the honeycomb maze, a behavioural paradigm for the study of spatial navigation in rats. The maze consists of 37 platforms that can be raised or lowered independently. Place navigation requires an animal to go to a goal platform from any of several start platforms via a series of sequential choices. For each, the animal is confined to a raised platform and allowed to choose between two of the six adjacent platforms, the correct one being the platform with the smallest angle to the goal-heading direction. Rats learn rapidly and their choices are influenced by three factors: the angle between the two choice platforms, the distance from the goal, and the angle between the correct platform and the direction of the goal. Rats with hippocampal damage are impaired in learning and their performance is affected by all three factors. The honeycomb maze represents a marked improvement over current spatial navigation tests, such as the Morris water maze1,2,3, because it controls the choices of the animal at each point in the maze, provides the ability to assess knowledge of the goal direction from any location, enables the identification of factors influencing task performance and provides the possibility for concomitant single-cell recording.

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