The park has everything going for it: ease of location, ease of escape and proximity to bars that don't mind a bunch of sweaty, sunburned people in shorts".
Mice completed acquisition and reversal training to assess learning, followed by a probe test to assess memory for the spatial location of the escape hole.
On the following days, during the hidden platform test, mice learned the location of the escape platform in relation to four external cues in the room.
The identical tetrodotoxin treatment did not prevent rats from learning the location of the escape platform in the Morris water maze, another test of spatial memory and navigation [9].
Rapamycin-fed transgenic PDAPP mice, however, showed improved learning (Figure 1a) and memory (Figure 1b), with improved performances on the last day of training and retention of the former location of the escape platform restored to levels indistinguishable from those of non-transgenic littermates (Figure 1b).
During subsequent training, the location of the escape platform was associated with a particular setting for the LED array.
The final experiment involved learning the location of an escape platform that was immediately below the water surface, i.e., not visible.
The mice must memorize the platform location in relation to various environmental cues, and there was nothing directly indicative of the location of the escape platform in and outside of the pool.
However, when tested during the reversal phase, which is more sensitive to smaller deficits in memory and learning, differences were found in the capacity of mice to relearn the new location of the escape box (Fig. 1 G).
Both WT and KI mice searched preferentially in the target area and the surrounding holes (areas +1 and -1), indicating that they clearly remembered the former location of the escape box.
However, APP/PS1 mice injected with saline spent an equal amount of time in each quadrant of the pool (F = 0.16, P > 0.05), indicating that this group did not remember the location of the escape platform.
