Barnes Maze

The Barnes maze is a dry-land spatial navigation task that assesses hippocampal-dependent spatial learning and memory without the stress of forced swimming. The apparatus is a circular platform (typically 90-120 cm diameter) with evenly spaced holes around the perimeter (usually 20 holes), one of which leads to an escape box underneath. Bright overhead lighting and/or a buzzer motivates the animal to locate and enter the escape hole using distal spatial cues, and escape latency decreases across training sessions as the animal learns the escape hole location.

The Barnes maze offers several advantages over the Morris water maze: it eliminates the hypothermia and swimming stress that can confound performance in strains with motor deficits, poor swimming ability, or high stress reactivity (e.g., 129 substrains, aged mice). The probe trial, conducted with the escape box removed, measures spatial memory through metrics including time in the target zone, primary latency (time to first visit the target hole), and primary errors (holes visited before the target). Serial search patterns can also be analyzed to distinguish spatial from non-spatial strategies.

ConductMaze interfaces with sensors at each hole to detect nose pokes and escape entries, automatically identifying the animal's search path. The software computes escape latency, error count, search strategy classification (direct, serial, or random), and probe trial quadrant analysis with automated data export.