Radial arm maze

The radial arm maze was designed by Olton and Samuelson in 1976 to measure spatial learning and memory in rats.

[4] The design ensures that, after checking for food at the end of each arm, the rat is always forced to return to the central platform before making another choice.

Olton and Samuelson found that rats have excellent memories for visited and unvisited arms; they made, on average, about 7.0 novel entries in their first 8 choices, and thus were 88% correct.

[5] Roberts found no decline in the percentage of correct choices as the number of arms on a radial maze were increased from 8 to 16 and then to 24.

[10] The radial arm maze has shown to be practicable to investigate how drugs affect memory performance.

[12] A particular study led by L. Mandolesi used subjects with William's Syndrome (WS) because of the interest placed on their cognitive profile.