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A detailed behavioral analysis of water-maze acquisition showed that the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist NPC17742 and the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine caused sensorimotor disturbances in behaviors required for maze performances and that these correlated with acquisition impairments in both hidden and visible platform versions of the maze in male rats. Behavioral disturbances included thigmotaxic swimming, swimming over and deflecting off the platform, abnormal swim behavior, and hyperactivity. Rats familiar with the behavioral strategies involved in the task performed normally under NPC17742 or scopolamine. The results indicated that drug-induced sensorimotor disturbances contributed to poor acquisition scores in naive rats. NMDA or muscarinic activity may contribute to but do not appear to be essential for spatial learning in the water maze.

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A detailed behavioral analysis of water-maze acquisition showed that the JV-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist NPC17742 and the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine caused sensorimotor disturbances in behaviors required for maze performance and that these correlated with acquisition impairments in both hidden and visible platform versions of the maze in male rats. Behavioral disturbances included thigmotaxic swimming, swimming over and deflecting off the platform, abnormal swim behavior, and hyperactivity. Rats familiar with the behavioral strategies involved in the task performed normally under NPC17742 or scopolamine. The results indicated that drug-induced sensorimotor disturbances contributed to poor acquisition scores in naive rats. NMDA or muscarinic activity may contribute to but do not appear to be essential for spatial learning in the water maze.The previous article reported results of a detailed behavioral analysis of water maze acquisition under D,L-2-amino-5phosphonovalerate (APV), an JV-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, and 6-cyano-7-nitroquinoxaline-2,3-dione (CNQX), a non-NMDA excitatory amino acid receptor antagonist (Cain, Saucier, Hall, Hargreaves, & Boon, 1996). The findings confirmed and extended previous observations of sensorimotor disturbances and documented several novel disturbances that occurred consistently in naive rats tested under CNQX or APV. A correlational analysis showed that there was a consistent association between a wide variety of sensorimotor disturbances and poor acquisition scores in both the hidden and visible platform versions of the maze and in nonmaze tasks such as walking along a narrow beam. These findings arc consistent with, but do not prove, the idea that the sensorimotor disturbances caused some or all of the inferred learning deficit, as reflected by conventional measures of water-maze acquisition.A striking finding of the study was that prior familiarity with the requirements of the task by nonspatial pretraining (Davis, Butcher, & Morris, 1992;Morris, 1989) resulted in rapid learning of the task when the rats were later trained under