ABSTRACT
In 1976, Olton and Samuelson published a paper titled “Remembrance of places passed: Spatial memory in rats,” in which they introduced a new piece of apparatus, the radial maze, and reported some surprising findings about rats’ ability to traverse this maze. The radial maze consisted of a central elevated octagonal platform, from which eight elevated arms radiated outward for about a meter. Rats initially were trained to find food at the end of each arm and then were tested on repeated trials in which food was placed at the end of each arm and the rat was allowed to start at the center platform and roam the maze freely until all eight pieces of food were collected. The primary finding of these experiments was that rats learned to collect all available food pellets, with a very low frequency of repeating entrances into alleys. After 10 to 20 days of practice, it was common for a rat to enter eight different alleys on its first eight choices. Although rats did occasionally repeat alley entrances (defined as an error), the average number of different alleys entered on the first eight choices was between 7.5 and 8.0.
