Emergence of spontaneous alternation in the kitten

Abstract

Two studies are reported that describe the development of spontaneous alternation in the kitten. The first indicates that 3- and 4-week-old kittens do not alternate whereas animals 5 weeks and older do alternate. The second suggests that inability to discriminate maze arms is an unlikely explanation for the lack of alternation among the youngest animals. The approximate simultaneity between the onset of alternation (described here) and the maturation of the kitten hippocampus (described by others) is taken as support for the notion that hippocampal maturation may be related to the development of spontaneous alternation.

Developmental changes in open‐field behavior in the kitten

“…Three behavioral changes which could be manifestations of the emergence of hippocampal function at 5-6 weeks of age in kittens have been identified in this and a preceding report (Frederickson & Frederickson, 1979): the onset of spontaneous alternation, a decrease of repetitive patterns of locomotion, and an increase in within-session habituation of open-field locomotion. A 4th behavioral change suggesting emerging hippocampal function at about that same age is the marked improvement in passive avoidance behavior seen between 25 and 50 days of age in kittens (Davis & Jensen, 1976).…”

“…Upon arrival at the laboratory, each litter was placed in a small room and left undisturbed with its mother for 15 min. Some of the kittens (n = 71) run in the open field were also run in a spontaneous alternation test (Frederickson & Frederickson, 1979) For open-field testing, each kitten was placed in the center of a well-lighted enclosed room (6 X 7 m), the carpeted floor of which was divided into 30 rectangles (45 X 64 cm) marked by tape on the floor. For 5 min the animal's locomotion about the room was observed through a I-way mirror and traced onto a paper sheet divided into squares corresponding to the squares marked on the observation loom floor.…”

Spontaneous alternation behavior in larval zebrafish

“…We used 6 day old larvae, while most studies used adult animals as their subjects. SAB in cats, rats and human infants developed over a similar time period to the hippocampus (Egger et al, 1973;Frederickson and Frederickson, 1979;Vecera et al, 1991). Hence, an increased SAB rate at a later developmental stage in zebrafish is foreseeable.…”

“…Furthermore, SAB was undetectable during early development in rats (Egger et al, 1973), cats (Frederickson and Frederickson, 1979) and human infants (Vecera et al, 1991) until 30 days, 5 weeks and 49 months after birth, respectively. Thus, the first occurrences of SAB corresponded timewise to hippocampal development in these animals.…”

“…This led to an increased rate of SAB (Dember and Richman, 1989). Besides rodents, SAB has also been described in humans (Vecera et al, 1991), marmosets (Izumi et al, 2013), rabbits (Hughes, 1973), cats (Frederickson and Frederickson, 1979), cockroaches (Wilson and Fowler, 1976), fruit flies (Bicker and Spatz, 1976), goldfish (Aderman and Dawson, 1970;Fidura and Leberer, 1974) and coral reef fish (Bate and Kirkby, 1977), among many other species.…”