Institute of Physiology AS CR, Prague, Czech Republic.
Physiol Res. 2013;62(Suppl 1):S1-S19. doi: 10.33549/physiolres.932635.
Spatial navigation comprises a widely-studied complex of animal behaviors. Its study offers many methodological advantages over other approaches, enabling assessment of a variety of experimental questions and the possibility to compare the results across different species. Spatial navigation in laboratory animals is often considered a model of higher human cognitive functions including declarative memory. Almost fifteen years ago, a novel dry-arena task for rodents was designed in our laboratory, originally named the place avoidance task, and later a modification of this approach was established and called active place avoidance task. It employs a continuously rotating arena, upon which animals are trained to avoid a stable sector defined according to room-frame coordinates. This review describes the development of the place avoidance tasks, evaluates the cognitive processes associated with performance and explores the application of place avoidance in the testing of spatial learning after neuropharmacological, lesion and other experimental manipulations.
空间导航包括广泛研究的一组动物行为。与其他方法相比，它具有许多方法学优势，能够评估各种实验问题，并有可能在不同物种之间比较结果。实验室动物的空间导航通常被认为是包括陈述性记忆在内的人类更高认知功能的模型。大约十五年前，我们实验室设计了一种新颖的用于啮齿动物的干场任务，最初命名为回避任务，后来对该方法进行了修改并称为主动回避任务。它采用一个连续旋转的竞技场，在该竞技场上训练动物回避根据房间框架坐标定义的稳定扇区。本文综述了回避任务的发展，评估了与表现相关的认知过程，并探讨了回避任务在神经药理学、损伤和其他实验操作后测试空间学习中的应用。
