Internationale Zeitschrift für Neurorehabilitation

Physical Separation of Motion into Three Categories for Evaluating the Behavioral Effects of Drugs in Mice

Abstract

Hiroto Shoji

Characterization of open-field behavior and locomotor activity is widely used to assess the influence of a drug on animal behavior. In this study, we developed an index to characterize the behavior of drug-administered mice (C57BL/6). A three-exponential-model exhibited the best fit to the log-log plots of moving duration vs. frequency data of the different probability density functions. Therefore, as a heuristic argument, we divided each walking event into three categories according to the duration of movement. Then, we examined the number of walking events, and travel distances in each walking categories. Significant differences were observed more often when walking events were divided into the three categories. Therefore, this process would be useful to detect the effect of drugs on locomotor activity in mice.