Variants of the Morris water maze task to comparatively assess human and rodent place navigation

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.