A model for the rat exploratory behavior in the elevated plus-maze

Abstract

The elevated plus-maze (EPM) is a standard animal model of fear/anxiety in which the rodent is initially placed at the center of an elevated four-arm maze in which two arms are open and two are enclosed by walls. The anxietyrelated behavior comes from the conflict between staying in a safe place (the enclosed arms) and exploring a potentially dangerous environment (the open arms). The rat's anxiety level in the EPM is characterized by two main measures, namely the number of times the animal enters each kind of arm and the time spent in each kind of arm. In this work we present a modified version of an earlier model [1] for rat exploratory behavior based on competition between motivation and aversion and compare the simulation results with experimental data for real rats