A Tactile-visual Conditional Discrimination Task for Testing Spatial Working Memory in Rats.

This protocol describes a novel dual task comparison across two variants of a tactile-visual conditional discrimination (CD) T-maze task, one is dependent upon spatial working memory (SWM; CDWM) and the other one (CDSTANDARD) is not. The task variants are equivalent in their sensory and motor requirements and overt behavior of the rat. Therefore, differences between the two task variants in the dependent variables such as choice accuracy, neural firing patterns, and the effects of pharmacological or optogenetic inactivation in brain regions of interest can be attributed to SWM, ruling out confounding sensorimotor variables, such as tactile, visual and self-motion cues. The CDWM task protocol is published in Hallock et al., 2013b and Urban et al., 2014.