Research on learning and memory in rodents
Processing information (learning) and the ability to recall or retrieve that information at a later time (memory) are cognitive functions that are widely studied in various areas of neuroscience. Animal models are used to investigate the effects of brain damage, neurological diseases, and novel compounds on cognition.
EthoVision® XT is the perfect tool to track animal behavior, activity, and movement. Noldus also offers additional equipment to make full automation of your research possible. Our collaboration with Med Associates allows us to offer high quality open fields and mazes to create a solution that suits your research.
Several paradigms are used to study the effects of genetics, brain injury, or certain compounds on learning and memory in rodents, such as:
A wizard to make your life easier
The latest version of EthoVision XT, version 8, offers a new user guided set-up; a wizard helps you get started by simply choosing your animal, your test, and some other basic settings. It leads you to a template, that you can fine-tune to your specific experiment. This way your experiment will be up and running quickly! EthoVision XT 8 includes a variety of templates, including those for the novel object recognition task, the radial arm maze, the T-maze, the water maze, and the Barnes maze.
Behaviors related to areas of interest 
For efficient data selection and analysis, EthoVision XT allows you to specify different zones or points of interest from the video image of your test arena. This allows the program to automatically measure parameters related to these zones. Examples include latencies: to reach the goal box of a Barnes maze, the baited arm of a radial arm maze, or the Atlantis platform in a water maze. Or you can measure the average distance to the Atlantis platform (indicating Gallagher’s proximity), or the amount of time spent in the proximity of a novel object.
Tracking movement and behavior in detail
EthoVision XT is able to detect and track not only the center point, but also the nose point and tail base of mice and rats. This allows for the accurate measurement of an animal’s position relative to certain objects in the arena or the arena itself. For example, in a novel object recognition test, the animal’s proximity to an object can be specified to the nose point. Or use it to discriminate between the animal poking only its nose around the corner or moving its entire body into one of the arms of a radial arm maze.
Automatic detection of behaviors
EthoVision XT automatically detects proximity and elongation. Proximity is a useful parameter to measure the animal’s interest in objects during a novel object recognition test. When tracking the three body points of your animal, you can detect body elongation which helps you to investigate exploratory behavior and curiosity. The thresholds for both proximity and elongation are by default set to what is generally used in research, but since every study is unique, you can adapt these thresholds yourself. Because at Noldus, we believe that the actual interpretation of behavior should be done by researchers. EthoVision XT provides you with the tools to easily do so. Read more…
Less interference – more efficiency
Automating your research provides a number of great benefits; it incr
eases efficiency and helps you to standardize your experiment, resulting in more reliable data. You can program EthoVision XT to automatically start and stop the tracking of your animal, saving you the hassle of doing it manually. For example, some researchers assume that an animal exhibits a strong preference for one of the objects in a novel object recognition test if it has been exploring this object for 38 seconds or longer. EthoVision XT can automatically stop tracking after that. Or set EthoVision XT to stop tracking if a rat in a water maze did not find the platform in the given amount of time.
Control of external equipment
But automation can do much more for you. That is why Noldus developed the Trial & Hardware Control Module. It takes automating your experiment a step further, by allowing you to control external hardware from within EthoVision XT. This control is based on user-definable protocols. EthoVision XT’s easy-to-use programming environment helps you in setting up anything from straight-forward to sophisticated experiments. You can control the doors of a T-maze or radial arm maze, or the Atlantis platform of a water maze. For example, you can raise the platform in a water maze automatically if the rat did not succeed in finding it after 90 seconds. Or you can start a session with all doors of a radial arm maze closed and open them after 10 seconds, and then close all but one door as soon as the animal entered that specific arm.
Parameters you need
Data interpretation is a crucial step in your research – EthoVision XT provides you with the useful parameters and data selection tools needed. Such as the average distance to the platform in a water maze (also known as Gallagher’s proximity), the total number of arm entries of a radial arm maze to collect all food rewards, or the total amount of time spent in proximity of the familiar versus the unfamiliar object in a novel object recognition test. It also reveals how these numbers change over consecutive trials, or how these compare between different treatment groups. It helps you to translate the results into conclusions. The amount of trials it took for the animal to directly walk to the correct hole in a Barnes maze could be taken as a measure of learning. Velocity of movement (or swimming) can be used as a measure of motivation. And by defining a zone as Whishaw’s corridor in a water maze, and using the in-zone parameter, you can calculate Whishaw’s error as indication of the correctness of the animal’s swim path from the starting point to the platform.