Schoenfeld Robby, Schiffelholz Thomas, Beyer Christian, Leplow Bernd, Foreman Nigel
Department of Psychology, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2017 Mar;139:117-127. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2016.12.022. Epub 2017 Jan 3.
Performance in the Morris water maze has been widely used in routine behavioural studies of rodents. Since the advent of computer-based virtual environments, adaptations of the water maze have become available for human research. Despite decades of comparative neuroscience, formal comparisons of human and animal place navigation performance are rare. We studied 36 subjects, 18 young male mice in a Morris water maze and 18 male students in a virtual version. Quantitative measures (escape latencies, distances and platform crossings) indicated no discernable differences between human and rodent performance, reinforcing the task's general validity and its implied cross-species comparability. However, we extracted, using an a priori free classification method, qualitatively different movement patterns for mice and humans, patterns that reflect the probable strategy that individuals might have been using to solve the task. Our results indicated young male students to have most likely solved the maze by means of spatial strategies whereas mice were observed more often to have adopted non-spatial strategies. These differences could be attributed to differences in our maze setups (spatial cues, task instruction, training protocol, motivation) and gave further hints that maze learning depends on many factors. In summary performance on both spatial tasks was equivalent in humans and mice but the kind of maze learning that was used to achieve maximum performance was different.
莫里斯水迷宫实验的表现已广泛应用于啮齿动物的常规行为研究中。自从基于计算机的虚拟环境出现以来，水迷宫实验的改进版本已可用于人类研究。尽管有几十年的比较神经科学研究，但人类和动物空间导航表现的正式比较却很少见。我们对36名受试者进行了研究，其中18只年轻雄性小鼠在莫里斯水迷宫中进行实验，18名男性学生在虚拟版本的水迷宫中进行实验。定量测量（逃避潜伏期、移动距离和穿越平台次数）表明，人类和啮齿动物的表现没有明显差异，这加强了该任务的普遍有效性及其隐含的跨物种可比性。然而，我们使用先验自由分类方法提取了小鼠和人类在性质上不同的运动模式，这些模式反映了个体在解决任务时可能采用的策略。我们的结果表明，年轻男性学生最有可能通过空间策略解决迷宫问题，而观察到小鼠更多地采用非空间策略。这些差异可能归因于我们迷宫设置的差异（空间线索、任务说明、训练方案、动机），并进一步暗示迷宫学习取决于许多因素。总之，人类和小鼠在这两项空间任务上的表现相当，但用于实现最佳表现的迷宫学习类型有所不同。
