Talk:Morris water maze

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Contents 1 Merge 2 Cleanup tag removed 3 Vandalism 4 Fishy 5 International Units 6 Water Depth 7 Number of trials

[edit] Merge

A message from Richard Baker at HVS Image UK on Dec 24, 2005. First let's mention that "Morris water maze" can also be called "Morris watermaze", "water maze", "watermaze". Wikipedia has picked up on that and merged an article by an academic and an article by myself, to make one blanket article. The join shows a bit, but the article is accurate and informative. The major problem is that Wikipedia's computer has picked up on apparent keywords, and indexed them mostly to completely irrelevant places, or even non-existent locations. This dear Wiki-editors is something to think about. Meanwhile, it's a good read....

I don't understand the "major problem" you mention. First, by "indexing" I'm assuming you mean linking, which converts a word into a clickable link to another Wikipedia article. This is done by human editors (i.e. not a computer) who add double-brackets around a word or words, e.g. [[Action potential]] gives Action potential, which is a link that can be clicked.

Second, I don't see how the links in question are to "completely irrelevant places". There are links to spatial memory, the hippocampus, latency, etc., all of which seem relevant to me. Granted, there are links colored in red to nonexistent articles. But that's not a problem at all -- one of the joys of Wikipedia is that anyone can click on one of those red links and author the article. --David Iberri (talk) 19:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree with the initial poster. It doesn't strike you that a link to "rat" isn't really appropriate to this article? Or a link to "opaque"? Or how about the link to "millimeters"? At this point, why not just link every word in the article? Hell, there's a link to "1994"! Not for long.

Since it's inception over 20 years ago the "Morris maze" (which is not a maze and should more appropriately be called the Morris "water navigation task") has gained enormous popularity. People have therefore come to just call it "the watermaze". It is inappropriate, however, that "water maze" redirects to this article. Many watermazes exist, real mazes. Denenberg developed an aquatic version of the [radial maze] in the early 90s, van Abeelen used an aquatic T maze in the late 60s or early 70s, etc. I myself used a "Lichter maze" in a 1988 publication in Behavior Genetics (18:153-165). Somebody should undo this redirect (I don't know how to do that). Crusio 11:06, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup tag removed

The article's not confusing, doesn't having any glaring spelling or grammatical errors, and conforms to how WP articles are usually formatted. Those are generally the reasons for requesting cleanup, so I removed the tag. --David Iberri (talk) 19:15, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

The article appears to be vandalized, but I don't know the original content to fix it.

"This ability is attributed to a spatial map in a brain area called the penis.

Once a rat is sacrificed, Satan himself is summoned forth with great venegance and destroys the water maze and consumes the other rats. The scientists heads are then impaled upon pikes to ward off other scientists."

Seems that this is unlikely. Gary Seven 16:21, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fishy

In the section Comparison to conventional mazes, the sentence "It has been suggested that mice may not actually aim to find the platform, but fool the technician into rescuing them." This seems to be giving an awful lot of credit to mice. Can they really deliberately try to fool to a person? I know that some animals play dead etc. to fool other entities, but to fool a person into rescuing them seems a whole nother cognitive level. Sounds fishy to me. Herostratus 03:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] International Units

The article says the pool is filled without one foot of water, shouldn't this be converted to international units ? XApple 06:33, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Water Depth

In the lab where I performed the Morris Water Maze, we would fill the pool up with only about 10 [cm] of water; but add a substance similar to milk in the water to render it opaque and hide the platform better. XApple 06:33, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number of trials

How many trials does a perfectly standard wild type rat need to head straight for the platform in an unchanging pool ? XApple 06:43, 25 July 2007 (UTC)