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Download ANY-maze for free
Download ANY-maze for free

Download ANY‑maze for free

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Managing your experimental design is crucial to successful automation of the Radial arm maze

ANY-maze is a great way to manage your experiments. Its intuitive design will help to walk you through your experimental plan and setup. This allows you to define each stage, the number of trials associated with it, the criterion for completion of the stage, etc.

This way you’ll always know which of your animals needs to be tested and where each animal is in its progression through a stage.

On the tabs below you'll find videos, recommended equipment and a list of results that are especially useful in the radial arm maze.

Page Intro picture

Precision tracking

ANY-maze’s whole body tracking allows you specify precisely when an arm entry should be scored.

For example, specifying an arm entry as occurring when 80% of the animal’s body is in the arm, equates very well with the traditional four-paws-in-the-arm rule. Watch the video to see this in action.

Precision tracking picture Play button

Keeping track of the specifics (managing stages and trials)

Radial arm maze experiments are usually comprised of a number of different stages (e.g. acquisition, 8-arm trial, 4-arm trial, etc.), with each stage including a number of repeated trials. ANY-maze allows you to specify your experimental design so that it is aware of and manages the different stages and the trials within them. This means that while running the tests, ANY-maze is automatically assessing training criteria to ensure you know which animal to test on which apparatus, for what purpose, stage and trial – as in the image on the right.

Keeping track of the specifics (managing stages and trials) picture

Detecting when the test is complete

A common task in the radial arm maze is to require the animal to visit every arm once; when it completes this task the test can end.

ANY-maze’s procedures are perfect for this – for example, the procedure on the right would end the test once the animal has visited all the arms of an 8-arm maze (Note that the order the animal visits the arms won’t actually matter)

Detecting when the test is complete picture

Calculating results

ANY-maze will report a wide range of results for every arm in the maze, but in the Radial arm maze, you’re usually interested in results such as Working memory errors and Reference memory errors, which aren’t specific to any one arm.

This is where ANY-maze’s calculations come in useful. Calculations can derive new results from those ANY-maze already has, so for example, Working memory errors can easily be calculated based on the number of entries into each of the arms.

Calculating results picture

Viewing the animal's track

ANY-maze can plot the animal’s track around the maze which provides a great visual tool for both confirming the arms visited and for contrasting the behaviour of different animals.

Viewing the animal's track picture