Barnes maze used in studying spatial memory in the mouse. The mouse is put in the center of a wooden platform. Because mice do not like open spaces they try to find some way to move out of it. The only way they can escape from the exposed space is to find the one hole out of 40 that leads to an escape hatch.

In our work with mice we have focused on memory for extrapersonal space as a model of explicit memory, because spatial memory is well represented in rodents and has been particularly well studied.