Life sciences research covers a broad range of topics, including the study of behavioral data. Researching behavior relies on different methods of data collection, such as observation and recording using animal models.
Mice or rats are a common choice for animal models as they are easy to work with and can be studied with real world impacts for human behavioral science. An efficient and useful procedure while conducting behavioral research in mice and rats is the open field activity test. This blog post will provide an overview of an open field activity test, explain how it is conducted, and provide further resources.
What is an Open Field Activity Test?
An open field activity test is a common laboratory procedure conducted on mice and rats in order to measure behavioral activity in response to certain stimuli. The main indicator researchers can measure, using an open field activity test, is movement. An animal’s motor behavior can provide insight into deeper cognitive and physiological functioning within the animal’s biological systems. For example, scientists can record data on curiosity and exploration, fear-induced behaviors like freezing or hiding, signs of illness, circadian patterns and reproductive motions.
The open field activity test can be applied to a wide variety of research fields, including the assessment of drugs on behavior or the outcomes of stimulating various senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. Due to its versatility, the open field activity test is often a fundamental part of behavioral research using animal models.
How to Conduct an Open Field Activity Test
Primarily focused on the physical observation of the test animals’ behavior, an open field activity test requires an enclosure to be performed. This enclosure prevents any mice or rats from escaping as well as limiting external influences from potentially impacting the experiments.
Open field enclosures provide an observable space in a controlled study environment to analyze rodent behavior. Typically, the animal subjects are placed in the enclosure and the researchers carry out testing either before or after being exposed to specific variables. Then, the animal models are observed for a period of time and target behaviors are meticulously documented. Attention to detail and scrupulous data collection are crucial to properly conducting an open field activity test.
Open Field Activity Tests with San Diego Instruments
As an expert in life science instruments for behavioral neuroscience research, San Diego Instruments provides products to efficiently and successfully conduct open field activity tests.
San Diego Instruments offers an open field single enclosure and an open field convertible enclosure to meet your specific behavioral testing needs and best provide data to answer your research questions. Our mazes are designed to for compatibility with our ANY-maze video tracking system, with manual doors for the upper arms and base leg starter door.
Our enclosures are versatile and ideal for spatial learning, memory tasks, emotional assessment and environmental modification in rodent models. Furthermore, we offer a photobeam activity system specially designed for open field activity tests that provides accurate qualitative analysis of mouse or rat behaviors observed during the data collection process. If you would like to find out more about our open field activity test products, contact us and our team would be happy to help.
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