The effects of aging and dorsal XXXX : performance on spatial and nonspatial comparable versions of the water maze.

@entity35 @entity131 @entity75
Aged intact and young hippocampal-lesioned @entity35 show similar deficits on the spatial water maze. However, this does not necessitate that the source of these deficits in the aged animals is due to @entity131 . These water maze deficits may arise from other aging factors such as changes in thermoregulation, muscle fatigue, swim ability, and response to stress. Consequently, it is imperative to examine the performance of aged @entity35 on a comparable nonhippocampal version of this task. Past attempts to develop a hippocampus-independent version of the water maze were confounded because these tasks were easier (i.e., the @entity35 spent much less time swimming in the water) than the spatial versions of the task. The current study examined performance on a hippocampus-independent task comparable in difficulty to the spatial water one. Middle-aged (16-m) and old (25-m) male F344 @entity35 were given sham or dorsal hippocampus lesions and tested on both a spatial and a nonspatial water maze. The middle-aged @entity35 with @entity75 were impaired on the spatial task but not on the nonspatial task. Conversely, aged animals showed a similar impairment on both types of water maze tasks. Additionally, @entity75 exacerbated the age-related impairment on both tasks. These findings indicate that caution must be used when interpreting the results of water maze tasks for aged animals.
