A Semi-Automated, Parallelized, and Flexible Spatial Navigation Task for Rats

Spatial navigation tasks for rodents have been an extremely useful tool for studying cognitive processes for decades, but are often laborious to administer and sensitive to experimenterinduced variability. To address these limitations, we have developed a parallelized maze system which runs four highly flexible maze environments simultaneously with automated reward delivery, enabling reduced experimenter involvement, increased throughput, and streamlined data collection. Further, our software tracks subject performance and manages the progression through a preset curriculum as subjects learn, reducing experimenter error and ensuring comparable learning curves across cohorts. Equipped with IR beambreak based reward ports, peristaltic pumps for liquid reward delivery, and overhead video tracking, our current maze accessories can be flexibly reconfigured to enable a vast array of behavioral tasks and support a wide range of experimental questions. A pilot cohort of young (4-8 month) and aged (28-32 month) male rats demonstrates that this apparatus enables the efficient training of a series of increasingly difficult visually cued and memorydependent spatial navigation task variants across a wide range of performance abilities. Significance StatementTo increase the efficiency and reliability of spatial navigation task administration, we have designed a behavioral apparatus which enables the training of four subjects in parallel on a variety of tasks with automated reward delivery. Further, we developed software to track subject performance and advance training parameters through a preset curriculum to reduce experimenter error and enable robust comparison of learning metrics across cohorts.