The radial arm maze as a tool in behavioral pharmacology.

This paper will review briefly the use of the radial arm maze as a tool to examine the neural systems that are involved in memory, and the influence of pharmacological compounds on memory. Of particular interest is the question of task validity, which is assessed by reference to four different criteria: operational, psychological, ethological, and neural (see also Walsh, this issue; [45, 53, 70, 75]). Each of these types of validity is reviewed below.