Sex differences in OF1 mice’s learning of the Hebb-Williams Maze

Abstract

The Hebb-Williams Maze is a test used to evaluate spa-tial learning in animals. Although sex differences in spatial ability have been observed in numerous species (males typically outperform females), inconclusive results have been obtained in the few studies that have used this test to assess male and female animals. This study investigated whether male OF1 mice performed better than OF1 mice on the Hebb-Williams Maze and whether any advantage was independent of the difficulty of the maze. We used a reduced version for mice, which consists of 5 mazes (3 easy and 2 difficult). In general, the results suggest that male mice performed better than female mice. The male mice showed shorter runtimes, a smaller number of errors, and fewer attempts to reach the criterion of acquisition. However, these sex differences were mainly found in the easy mazes but not in the difficult ones. We discuss the explanations for these differences in learning mazes based on their difficulty and conclude that the categorization of the difficulty of the mazes is sex-dependent.