The watermaze

This chapter chronicles the personal account of the development and refinement of the spatial navigation task, now known as the watermaze. The watermaze began at the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews, once famous for its work on the neurobiology of various marine animals, in the laboratory of Richard Morris. In the late 1970s, walking past tanks of various sea creatures every day to his new laboratory, Morris pondered whether a “maze” in which rats had to swim could be a useful way to examine spatial memory and to investigate the functional significance of recently discovered hippocampal place cells. And, low and behold, the watermaze was born. In this chapter, Morris highlights and discusses the step-by-step laboratory setup, apparatus, different training protocols, critical control procedures, and optimal data analysis procedures for the watermaze. His key message is that the watermaze is not just one task, but a family of procedures suited to diverse scientific questions.