The Morris water maze, a spatial learning task first introduced by Dr. Richard Morris (Morris, 1981, 1984), is one of the most extensively used behavioral paradigms used to examine hippocampus-dependent spatial learning and memory in rodents, such as rats and mice (Tanda et al., 2009). In water maze tests, animals are forced to swim in a circular pool of milky water. In order to escape from the...

Mouse models of Alzheimer's Disease are essential for understanding how pathological cascades alter neural circuitry and eventually disrupt cognitive function. A key prerequisite for the use of such models, therefore, is the ability to accurately and reliably measure cognitive function. The Morris Water Maze has emerged in the field as the standard test for assessing spatial cognition. There ar...

BACKGROUND The economic burden associated with major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders render both disorders the most common and debilitating psychiatric illnesses. To date, the exact cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology, successful treatment and prevention of these highly associated disorders have not been identified. Akt2 is a key protein in the phosphatidy...

The Morris water maze, developed by Morris (J Neurosci Methods 1984: 11: 47-60), is a behavioral experiment designed to test the spatial memory. When repeating the experiment several times, the changes in time (latency) and distance (path) taken to reach the platform are indicators for the learning and memory abilities of the rat. In juvenile toxicity studies, it is of interest to test whether ...

We evaluated the effects of pre-germinated brown rice (hatsuga genmai, PGR) on learning and memory and compared them with those of polished rice or cornstarch. In mice that were fed pellets of polished rice or PGR for two weeks, the learning ability in the Morris water maze test was significantly enhanced compared with mice that were fed cornstarch pellets. In the Y-maze test, the intake of foo...

The function and the role of glucosylceramide have not been well studied in the central nervous system. This study was aimed to investigate the possible roles of glucosylceramide in memory function in aged mice. Glucosylceramide (50 mg/kg, p.o.) showed memory enhancing activity after 3-month treatment in the aged mice (C56BL/6, 18-20 months old) through Y-maze, novel objective test, and Morris ...

Fructus Akebiae (FAE) is a component of traditional Chinese medicines used for the clinical treatment of amnesia. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of FAE extract on scopolamine-induced learning and memory impairment in mice and Sprague-Dawley rats. Treatment with FAE (2.5, 5 and 10 mg/kg) was investigated in scopolamine-treated animals, and its effects on different ty...

We present an automatic video processing system for tracking analysis in the Morris water escape testing videos. This system is able to extract automatically from such videos information (metadata) describing the spatiotemporal trajectories of animals in the maze and the timings of behavioral events such as stopping or crossing of a target area. The specific semantic metadata are produced by th...

Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common causes of neuropathy. Although antioxidant and antidiabetic effects of the aqueous extract of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) (AEOP) have been demonstrated before by other researchers, we did not find any study that assessed the psychobiological effects of AEOP in diabetes induced animals. Thirty ovariectomized (OVX) female Wistar rats were randomly div...