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Where the water maze came from (and the two Morrises)

Yes, there are two of them. No, they are not the same person.

By the watermaze.org editors · Updated

The water maze is named after Professor Richard Morris, who developed it in the early 1980s. His 1981 paper in Learning and Motivation showed that rats can learn to swim to a platform hidden in opaque water using cues around the room, with nothing marking the spot itself. A year later, in Nature, Morris and colleagues showed that rats with hippocampal lesions struggled to find the hidden platform. In 1984 he set out the procedure in detail in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods,. If you cite one paper for the method, it is usually this one; it is also the "original paper" the old watermaze.org menu linked to.

But read the credits on this site and you will meet a second Dr Morris. The original editor's notes put it best:

From the original watermaze.org (1998–2013)

Useful to know

Editor's Notes

24 deg C is cooler that the average rat-pool (26deg C).

There is more than one Morris!
a. R.J. Morris (Dr Roger Morris) kindly provided this mouse-info.
b. R.G.M. Morris (Prof Richard Morris) - invented the Water Maze technique.

Metric to imperial conversions: 1 inch= 2.54 cm (this is a precise conversion); 12 inches = 1 foot (ft)

How to light the pool-room: • For white pools use 2 fluorescent strip lights. Modern compact strip lights are more intense - please use a diffuser-fitting.
• Following our cooperation with Reneuron UK, an improved setup is recommended for black pools, which avoids reflections. Use the set-up shown above right. Use 4 up lighters. Use lamps of ~ 60 watts, not powerful lamps. The lights should be fixed high enough that they are not seen by the camera, e.g. 6ft from floor. If the camera sees lights, reflections will be created within the lens.

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Original text: watermaze.org Editor's Notes ("Useful to know"). Reproduced unchanged. Copyright Richard Baker© 2013. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, that box isn't only about Morrises. The original "Useful to know" notes mix the two Morrises with water temperature, unit conversions and lighting, and we've kept them together exactly as they were. You'll see them again on the editor's notes page.

The papers that made it famous

  • Morris (1981). Spatial localization does not require the presence of local cues. Learning and Motivation 12(2):239-260. doi:10.1016/0023-9690(81)90020-5
    Morris showed that rats can learn to escape onto a platform hidden in opaque water using distal room cues, without any local cue marking the goal. This paper introduced the water maze as a test of spatial localisation.
  • Morris et al. (1982). Place navigation impaired in rats with hippocampal lesions. Nature 297(5868):681-683. doi:10.1038/297681a0
    Morris, Garrud, Rawlins and O'Keefe found that rats with hippocampal lesions were impaired at finding a hidden platform in the water maze but could still swim to a visible platform. The study linked water maze place navigation to hippocampal function.
  • Morris (1984). Developments of a water-maze procedure for studying spatial learning in the rat. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 11(1):47-60. doi:10.1016/0165-0270(84)90007-4
    Morris describes developments of the open-field water maze procedure in which rats learn to escape from opaque water onto a hidden platform. It covers automatic tracking of the rat's position without attached LEDs, and variants for studying different aspects of spatial memory (such as working memory) and non-spatial discrimination learning.
  • Morris et al. (1986). Selective impairment of learning and blockade of long-term potentiation by an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, AP5. Nature 319(6056):774-776. doi:10.1038/319774a0
    Morris, Anderson, Lynch and Baudry showed that chronic infusion of the NMDA receptor antagonist AP5 impaired place learning in the water maze while blocking hippocampal long-term potentiation, without affecting visual discrimination learning. The study linked NMDA-dependent plasticity to spatial learning.

For a detailed modern step-by-step protocol, see Vorhees and Williams (2006) in Nature Protocols, the "more detailed methodology" the old site pointed to. You'll find more in classic papers.

For an article about HVS Image, see the one reprinted from American Laboratory magazine.

Sources

  1. Morris (1981). Spatial localization does not require the presence of local cues. Learning and Motivation 12(2):239-260. doi:10.1016/0023-9690(81)90020-5
  2. Morris et al. (1982). Place navigation impaired in rats with hippocampal lesions. Nature 297(5868):681-683. doi:10.1038/297681a0
  3. Morris (1984). Developments of a water-maze procedure for studying spatial learning in the rat. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 11(1):47-60. doi:10.1016/0165-0270(84)90007-4
  4. Morris et al. (1986). Selective impairment of learning and blockade of long-term potentiation by an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, AP5. Nature 319(6056):774-776. doi:10.1038/319774a0
  5. Vorhees & Williams (2006). Morris water maze: procedures for assessing spatial and related forms of learning and memory. Nature Protocols 1(2):848-858. doi:10.1038/nprot.2006.116

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