Table 1. Advantages and disadvantages of the radial arm maze (RAM), Barnes maze (BM), and Morris water maze (MWM).

Behavioral assays	Advantages	Disadvantages
Radial arm maze	• Suitable for spatial working memory assessment. • Less laborious.	• Possible exploitation of serial strategy. • Selection of choice-point decision rather than spatial strategy due to olfactory cue trails.
Barnes maze	• Suitable for spatial learning and memory assessment. • Ability to track individual trajectory of different exploration patterns.	• Lack of aversive stimuli may reduce animal’s motivation to escape. • Inconsistent escape behaviors between rats and mice.
Morris water maze	• Reliable in various cross-species studies including guinea pigs, rats, and mice. • Ability to track various swimming strategies (spatial, non-spatial, and thigmotaxis). • Able to tract non-cognitive factor based on cued task.	• Possibility of hypothermia and excessive stress due to the extensive and uncontrolled trials. • Not sensitive for spatial working memory assessment.
Contextual fear conditioning test	• Reliable for various rat and mouse strains. • Less affectability to motor dysfunction. • Suitable for evaluating associative learning which involves multiple brain regions (hippocampus, amygdala, and neocortex).	• Assessment on contextual learning does not necessarily represent spatial learning. • Not sensitive for hippocampal-dependent learning.
Object location memory test	• Cost-effective. • Simple protocols without integration with intricate experiment instruments and extensive analysis parameters.	• Motor dysfunction due to treatment or surgical manipulations may confound the test habituation. • Exhibition of anxiety in normal animals can affect the animals’ learning.