Morris water navigation task

[1] It enables learning, memory, and spatial working to be studied with great accuracy, and can also be used to assess damage to particular cortical regions of the brain.

For example, neuroscientists examine the effect of differences of sex, weight, strength, stress levels, age, and strain of species.

However, this measure is confounded by swimming speed, not necessarily a cognitive factor, and path length between point of origin and platform is a parameter more closely related to spatial learning.

Other parameters are measured during probe trials: the escape platform is removed and the mice or rats are allowed to search for it for a fixed time (often 60 seconds).

[21] The T-maze, for instance, only requires the rat or mouse to make a binary decision, choose left or right (or East or West).

[11] Another reason this task became popular is that rats (but not mice)[19] are natural swimmers, but dislike colder water (mice simply dislike water of any temperature), so in order to perform the task they do not need to be motivated by food deprivation or electrical shock.

[14] When the searching times for the platform in the target quadrant are reduced in the probe trial, this is seen as direct evidence that the spatial memory of the rat must be impaired.

About 20% of the variability was explained by differing tendencies of mice to float passively in the water until "rescued" by the experimenter.