A Semi-Automated, Parallelized, and Flexible Spatial Navigation Task for Rats

Spatial navigation tasks for rodents have been an extremely useful tool for studying cognitive processes for decades, but are often laborious to administer, inefficient, and sensitive to experimenter-induced variability. To address these limitations, we have developed a parallelized maze system which runs four highly flexible maze environments simultaneously with automated reward delivery to reduce experimenter involvement, increase throughput, and streamline data collection. Further, our software tracks subject performance and manages the progression through a pre-set curriculum as subjects learn, reducing experimenter error and ensuring comparable learning curves across cohorts. Equipped with IR beam-break based reward ports, peristaltic pumps for liquid reward delivery, and overhead video tracking, our current maze accessories can be flexibly reconfigured to enable a vast array of behavioral tasks and support a wide range of important experimental questions. A pilot cohort of young (4-8 month) and aged (28-32 month) male rats demonstrates that this task enables the efficient training of a series of increasingly difficult visually cued and memory-dependent spatial navigation tasks which are likely to be sensitive to age-related changes.