title: Water T-maze: a useful assay for determination of repetitive behaviors in mice.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Repetitive behavior is a term used to describe a wide variety of invariant and inappropriate behaviors that occur in many diverse conditions, including autism. It is necessary to utilize and/or design rodent behavioral assays that exploit individual types of repetitive behavior so that underlying pathology and therapeutic measures can be determined. A variety of high-throughput assays to investigate lower order repetitive behaviors are available for rodents, whereas, fewer assays are available to investigate higher order repetitive behaviors, such as perseverative behavior. BTBR T(+)tf/J (BTBR) mice, harbor behavioral deficits that share similarity to the core deficits found in autism, yet have not conclusively demonstrated deficits in conventional reversal learning tasks (i.e. Morris water maze (MWM), T-maze) which are typically used to examine perseverance.
  
  
  METHODS
  By combining elements of both the MWM and T-maze, we designed a water T-maze assay to determine if perseverative behavior could become perceptible in BTBR mice.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We found that BTBR mice show a significant impairment in reversal learning as compared to C57BL/6J (B6) mice in our water-T-maze reversal learning assay.
  Our water T-maze is sensitive, simple to perform, inexpensive and less time intensive than other tasks that can be used to measure higher order repetitive behaviors.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings suggest that our water T-maze assay is effective for determining perseverance, which is not readily revealed by using conventional methods.
authors.affiliation: New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, Department of Developmental Neurobiology, 1050 Forest Hill Road, Staten Island, NY 10314, United States. Electronic address: srg2156@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Sara Rose
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Guariglia
authors.forename: Kathryn K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Chadman
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D035841:Behavioral Research / Q000379:methods*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL
keywords: Autism; BTBR T(+)tf/J; Repetitive behavior; Reversal learning; Water T-maze