ArticleJournal of visualized experiments : JoVE2014
The use of the puzzle box as a means of assessing the efficacy of environmental enrichment.
Article in Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Article
- Problem Solving in Animals: Proposal for an Ontogenetic Perspective.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- The development of a cognitive rehabilitation task for mice.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2020Article
- Improving reproducibility in animal research by splitting the study population into several 'mini-experiments'.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Is There a Future for PPARs in the Treatment of Neuropsychiatric Disorders?Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Effects of Various Commercially Available Enrichment Options on Handling and Chronic Stress Markers in Female ICR Mice.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2019Article
- Environmental Enrichment From Birth Impacts Parvalbumin Expressing Cells and Wisteria Floribunda Agglutinin Labelled Peri-Neuronal Nets Within the Developing Murine Striatum.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2019Article
- Enriched environment elevates expression of growth associated protein-43 in the substantia nigra of SAMP8 mice.Neural regeneration research · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Environmental enrichment can dramatically influence the development and function of neural circuits. Further, enrichment has been shown to successfully delay the onset of symptoms in models of Huntington's disease (1-4), suggesting environmental factors can evoke a neuroprotective effect against the progressive, cellular level damage observed in neurodegenerative disorders. The ways in which an animal can be environmentally enriched, however, can vary considerably. Further, there is no straightforward manner in which the effects of environmental enrichment can be assessed: most methods require either fairly complicated behavioral paradigms and/or postmortem anatomical/physiological analyses. This protocol describes the use of a simple and inexpensive behavioral assay, the Puzzle Box (5-7) as a robust means of determining the efficacy of increased social, sensory and motor stimulation on mice compared to cohorts raised in standard laboratory conditions. This simple problem solving task takes advantage of a rodent's innate desire to avoid open enclosures by seeking shelter. Cognitive ability is assessed by adding increasingly complex impediments to the shelter's entrance. The time a given subject takes to successfully remove the obstructions and enter the shelter serves as the primary metric for task performance. This method could provide a reliable means of rapidly assessing the efficacy of different enrichment protocols on cognitive function, thus paving the way for systematically determining the role specific environmental factors play in delaying the onset of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disease.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.