• Corpus ID: 141620610

Fully Automated 24/7 Behavioral Screening for Mutations in Targeted Cognitive Mechanisms in the Mouse

@inproceedings{Gallistel2008FullyA2,
  title={Fully Automated 24/7 Behavioral Screening for Mutations in Targeted Cognitive Mechanisms in the Mouse},
  author={Charles Randy Gallistel and Adam Philip King and Alan M Daniel and Efstathios B. Papachristos and Fuat Balcı},
  year={2008}
}

• C. Gallistel, A. King, +2 authors F. Balcı
• Published 2008
• Psychology, Biology

Current screens for memory defects in mutant mice, such as the Morris water maze, generally proceed on the assumption that memory impairment will be manifest in an altered rate of learning. The rate of learning in mutant and wild-type strains is estimated by plotting a group average measure of performance--for example, the mean latency to find the platform--as a function of trials. A problem with this approach is that the gradual approach to asymptote seen in groupaverage plots is an artifact of the averaging [1-3]. Thus, the measured quantity, the learning rate, does not reflect a meaningful quantity within the individual subjects. A second problem is that the trial-by-trial handling of the mice is stressful to them and wasteful of the experimenter’s time. The results strongly reflect response to handling stress, and the paradigms cannot be scaled up to allow for large scale screening. We believe there is a large latent demand for the large-scale behavioral screening of mutant mice for heritable malfunctions in the mechanisms of cognition. Seymour Benzer and his students, in their seminal use of genetics to get at the molecular biology of the circadian clock [4] have shown