The Free-movement pattern Y-maze: A cross-species measure of working memory and executive function

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Numerous neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders are associated with deficits in executive functions such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. Progress in developing effective treatments for disorders may benefit from targeting these cognitive impairments, the success of which is predicated on the development of animal models with validated behavioural assays. Zebrafish offer a promising model for studying complex brain disorders, but tasks assessing executive function are lacking. The Free-movement pattern (FMP) Y-maze combines aspects of the common Y-maze assay, which exploits the inherent motivation of an organism to explore an unknown environment, with analysis based on a series of sequential two-choice discriminations. We validate the task as a measure of working memory and executive function by comparing task performance parameters in adult zebrafish treated with a range of glutamatergic, cholinergic and dopaminergic drugs known to impair working memory and cognitive flexibility. We demonstrate the cross-species validity of the task by assessing performance parameters in adapted versions of the task for mice and Drosophila, and finally a virtual version in humans, and identify remarkable commonalities between vertebrate species’ navigation of the maze. Together, our results demonstrate that the FMP Y-maze is a sensitive assay for assessing working memory and cognitive flexibility across species from invertebrates to humans, providing a simple and widely applicable behavioural assay with exceptional translational relevance.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.3758/s13428-020-01452-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Related collections

Most cited references 87

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Global, regional, and national burden of neurological disorders, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Valery L. Feigin, Emma Nichols, Tahiya Alam … (2020)

Summary Background Neurological disorders are increasingly recognised as major causes of death and disability worldwide. The aim of this analysis from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 is to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date estimates of the global, regional, and national burden from neurological disorders. Methods We estimated prevalence, incidence, deaths, and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs; the sum of years of life lost [YLLs] and years lived with disability [YLDs]) by age and sex for 15 neurological disorder categories (tetanus, meningitis, encephalitis, stroke, brain and other CNS cancers, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, motor neuron diseases, idiopathic epilepsy, migraine, tension-type headache, and a residual category for other less common neurological disorders) in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016. DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, was the main method of estimation of prevalence and incidence, and the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm) was used for mortality estimation. We quantified the contribution of 84 risks and combinations of risk to the disease estimates for the 15 neurological disorder categories using the GBD comparative risk assessment approach. Findings Globally, in 2016, neurological disorders were the leading cause of DALYs (276 million [95% UI 247–308]) and second leading cause of deaths (9·0 million [8·8–9·4]). The absolute number of deaths and DALYs from all neurological disorders combined increased (deaths by 39% [34–44] and DALYs by 15% [9–21]) whereas their age-standardised rates decreased (deaths by 28% [26–30] and DALYs by 27% [24–31]) between 1990 and 2016. The only neurological disorders that had a decrease in rates and absolute numbers of deaths and DALYs were tetanus, meningitis, and encephalitis. The four largest contributors of neurological DALYs were stroke (42·2% [38·6–46·1]), migraine (16·3% [11·7–20·8]), Alzheimer's and other dementias (10·4% [9·0–12·1]), and meningitis (7·9% [6·6–10·4]). For the combined neurological disorders, age-standardised DALY rates were significantly higher in males than in females (male-to-female ratio 1·12 [1·05–1·20]), but migraine, multiple sclerosis, and tension-type headache were more common and caused more burden in females, with male-to-female ratios of less than 0·7. The 84 risks quantified in GBD explain less than 10% of neurological disorder DALY burdens, except stroke, for which 88·8% (86·5–90·9) of DALYs are attributable to risk factors, and to a lesser extent Alzheimer's disease and other dementias (22·3% [11·8–35·1] of DALYs are risk attributable) and idiopathic epilepsy (14·1% [10·8–17·5] of DALYs are risk attributable). Interpretation Globally, the burden of neurological disorders, as measured by the absolute number of DALYs, continues to increase. As populations are growing and ageing, and the prevalence of major disabling neurological disorders steeply increases with age, governments will face increasing demand for treatment, rehabilitation, and support services for neurological disorders. The scarcity of established modifiable risks for most of the neurological burden demonstrates that new knowledge is required to develop effective prevention and treatment strategies. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

0 comments Cited 1265 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Inverted-U-shaped dopamine actions on human working memory and cognitive control.

Roshan Cools, Mark D'Esposito (2011)

Brain dopamine (DA) has long been implicated in cognitive control processes, including working memory. However, the precise role of DA in cognition is not well-understood, partly because there is large variability in the response to dopaminergic drugs both across different behaviors and across different individuals. We review evidence from a series of studies with experimental animals, healthy humans, and patients with Parkinson's disease, which highlight two important factors that contribute to this large variability. First, the existence of an optimum DA level for cognitive function implicates the need to take into account baseline levels of DA when isolating the effects of DA. Second, cognitive control is a multifactorial phenomenon, requiring a dynamic balance between cognitive stability and cognitive flexibility. These distinct components might implicate the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, respectively. Manipulating DA will thus have paradoxical consequences for distinct cognitive control processes, depending on distinct basal or optimal levels of DA in different brain regions. Copyright © 2011 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

0 comments Cited 514 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour.

David Sims, Emily Southall, Nicolas Humphries … (2008)

Many free-ranging predators have to make foraging decisions with little, if any, knowledge of present resource distribution and availability. The optimal search strategy they should use to maximize encounter rates with prey in heterogeneous natural environments remains a largely unresolved issue in ecology. Lévy walks are specialized random walks giving rise to fractal movement trajectories that may represent an optimal solution for searching complex landscapes. However, the adaptive significance of this putative strategy in response to natural prey distributions remains untested. Here we analyse over a million movement displacements recorded from animal-attached electronic tags to show that diverse marine predators-sharks, bony fishes, sea turtles and penguins-exhibit Lévy-walk-like behaviour close to a theoretical optimum. Prey density distributions also display Lévy-like fractal patterns, suggesting response movements by predators to prey distributions. Simulations show that predators have higher encounter rates when adopting Lévy-type foraging in natural-like prey fields compared with purely random landscapes. This is consistent with the hypothesis that observed search patterns are adapted to observed statistical patterns of the landscape. This may explain why Lévy-like behaviour seems to be widespread among diverse organisms, from microbes to humans, as a 'rule' that evolved in response to patchy resource distributions.

0 comments Cited 312 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Contributors

Madeleine Cleal:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9175-606X

madeleine.cleal@port.ac.uk

Matthew O. Parker:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7172-5231

matthew.parker@port.ac.uk

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Behav Res Methods

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Behav Res Methods

Title: Behavior Research Methods

Publisher: Springer US (New York )

ISSN (Print): 1554-351X

ISSN (Electronic): 1554-3528

Publication date (Electronic): 3 August 2020

Publication date PMC-release: 3 August 2020

Publication date (Print): 2021

Volume: 53

Issue: 2

Pages: 536-557

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.4701.2, ISNI 0000 0001 0728 6636, School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, , University of Portsmouth, ; Old St Michael’s Building, White Swan Road, Portsmouth, PO1 2DT UK

[2 ]GRID grid.60969.30, ISNI 0000 0001 2189 1306, Medicines Research Group, , University of East London, ; London, UK

[3 ]GRID grid.8186.7, ISNI 0000000121682483, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, ; Aberystwyth, Ceredigion UK

[4 ]GRID grid.5491.9, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9297, School of Psychology, , University of Southampton, ; Southampton, UK

Author information

Madeleine Cleal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9175-606X

Barbara D. Fontana https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2832-400X

Daniel C. Ranson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1166-5158

Sebastian D. McBride https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5120-0115

Jerome D. Swinny https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8194-5481

Edward S. Redhead https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7771-1228

Matthew O. Parker https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7172-5231

Article

Publisher ID: 1452

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-020-01452-x

PMC ID: 8062322

PubMed ID: 32748238

SO-VID: 6790fb22-b2f6-47bb-abc2-4d4418c8c173

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Funding

Funded by: University of Portsmouth

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

Keywords: fmp y-maze,zebrafish,drosophila,working memory,executive function,translational research

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

Keywords: fmp y-maze, zebrafish, drosophila, working memory, executive function, translational research

The Free-movement pattern Y-maze: A cross-species measure of working memory and executive function

Read this article at

Abstract

Electronic supplementary material

Related collections

Measurement of Glucocorticoid Receptor Signaling in Major Depression

Most cited references 87

Global, regional, and national burden of neurological disorders, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Inverted-U-shaped dopamine actions on human working memory and cognitive control.

Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour.

Author and article information

Contributors

Journal

Affiliations

Author information

Article

History

Funding

Categories

Custom metadata

Comments

Comment on this article

Similar content 30

Cited by 22

Most referenced authors 1,157