The novel object recognition task (NORT)
A NORT experiment was conducted to evaluate the mice’s ability to recognize new objects versus familiar objects when they were allowed to explore freely (Dere et al. , 2007). The mice were placed in the testing room 30 minutes before the experiment on day one following MWM to become accustomed to the conditions. All the mice were allowed to acclimate themselves to an open-field arena (50 cm × 50 cm, dim light, 24 °C) and two blocks in it for 10 min twice a day for 2 days. All mice were allowed to explore two blocks for five minutes on the following day, and 1 hour and 24 hours later, mice were given five minutes to explore an unfamiliar block with a different shape and color. The recognition indexes (%) were calculated by the ratio of the time spent exploring a novel object over the total amount of time spent in each group to evaluate memory.