New spatial cognition tests for mice: Passive place avoidance on stable and active place avoidance on rotating arenas

Dry arenas are a convenient tool for assessing the spatial navigation abili ties of rodents. In this paper, mice must avoid a punished sector of a dry arena from which they are expelled by a puff of compressed air. The positio n of the punished sector is defined relative to the coordinate system of th e room. In a stable environment the mice can use both extramaze and intrama ze landmarks to orient themselves accurately. However, when the shock area is defined by extramaze landmarks, continuous rotation of the arena at 1 rp m makes it impossible to solve the avoidance task using arena-based cues or idiothesis, The avoidance can only be solved by paying attention to extram aze cues. Our protocol tested spatial abilities on stable and rotating aren as. The acquisition of the task was manifested under both conditions by a s ignificant improvement of performance within the first session (short-term memory component) and at the beginning of the 24-h delayed second session ( long-term memory component). (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc.