USC Brain Project: Hippocampus and Navigation Group

The TAM-WG Model: The Maze Environment

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The maze environment is where you can see the behavioral part of the experiment. The view shows the "bird's eye view" of the behavioral apparatus. If the experiments use the same maze, but different behavioral conditions, the maze is replicated. For example, in Hirsh et al.'s (1978) experiments, in one trial food is located on the left arm of a T-maze and in the subsequent day, water is located on the right arm.

In this case, for each food and water session (composed of three trials each), food is placed on the left arm (the yellow rectangle in the maze below) and water on the right arm (the cyan rectangle), respectively.

In the O'Keefe (1983) experiment, food is first located on the left arm of the T-maze and so the rat needs to learn to go consistenly to the left. After reaching criteria, the reversal procedure starts. Food is placed on the right arm and every third trial is probed with a 8-arms radial maze.

In "The Maze Environment" window, two pull-down menus are available:

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University of Southern California Brain Simulation Lab
All rights reserved.
Author: Alex Guazzelli <aguazzel@rana.usc.edu>