Assessment of sustained and divided attention in rats

Behavioral tasks must be evaluated in terms of the cognitive functions they require in order to be performed. All of the tasks described in this chapter can be used with each of four experimental manipulations: stimulation of a single brain region by drugs or small electrical current, impairment of normal function by production of a lesion or administration of appropriate pharmacological agents, recording of brain activity during the performance of a specific behavioral task, or behavioral phenotyping of transgenic and knockout mice for genes expressed in specific brain regions. This unit describes protocols for the radial arm maze task and the water maze task, both of which require intact spatial memory abilities.