4.4.2. Beam Walking Test (BW)

Primarily, the task assesses sensorimotor coordination. The animal had to walk along a 2 m long wooden beam, at first wide (4.5 cm) and then narrow (2.2 cm), located 1 m above the floor, to reach its homecage at the opposite end. During the training period, the rat was prompted to walk only 0.5 m or 1 m of the beam length before the full length in the testing phase (see the order of trials in Table 2).

Design of the beam walking test.

The performance was observed by two experimenters, watching the animal from opposite sides. The time needed to traverse the beam and the number of footslips (when at least one of the rat’s paws slipped from the upper surface of the beam) were evaluated.