In the context of our study, we have interpreted high alternation rate as increased exploratory behavior in young and ACHE fish, and low alternation rate in aged animals as the development of stereotypy.
However, the behavioural strategy used by rats in some spontaneous alternation paradigms with very high alternation rates probably differs from the "standard" spontaneous alternation strategy.
Notably, however, animals can obtain a high alternation score in the continuous spontaneous alternation Y-maze task by adopting a consistent turn strategy (e.g. always turn left) which does not necessarily reflect their ability to remember which arms they have already visited.
Similarly, RSV fed animals had significantly higher total alternation (22±5%) compared to CTL animals (U = 9, p = 0.025, Fig. 1B).
The pharmacological screening indicated in the Y maze test that all the drugs had significantly higher spontaneous alternation percentage than the nontreated LPS injected mice.
Finally, the local synchronization was measured at a low sampling rate, which impeded investigating high rhythm alternation in RE.
Notably, there was also a significant interaction between maze and order (F 1,14) = 7.42, p < 0.05): mice showed higher levels of alternation in the standard maze if they had experienced the automated maze first.
Whereas the first-order repetition effect is supposed to rely on an automatic facilitation mechanism, based on the memory trace of the previous stimulus-response event [3], [4], the higher-order repetition effect is considered to reflect response-monitoring activity, which would be higher for response alternations [6].
Normal mice have spontaneously high levels of alternation, whereas hippocampal-lesioned mice are dramatically impaired.
