Continuous Spontaneous Alternation and Turn Alternation in Artemia sp.

Free-running spontaneous alternation refers to the animal’s tendency to prefer the least recently visited locations in successive spatial choices, which is attributed to the animals’ choice between stimuli based on prior experience. Turn alternation, which is observed in directional choices preceded by a forced turn in one direction, also reflects the animals’ tendency to alternate between directional choices but this tendency has been assumed to rely on other cues (e.g., proprioceptive cues) derived from the prior responses (e.g., forced turn in one direction). Based on previous studies, the turn alternation appears to rely on more primitive (lower-form) information features and to be a more frequently observed empirical phenomenon than the spontaneous alternation. We investigated these two behavioral alternation tendencies in Artemia sp. Experiment 1 tested the continuous spontaneous alternation (cSAB) performance of Artemia sp. in two different mazes: t-maze (three options) and plus maze (four options). Experiment 2 tested the turn alternation performance of Artemia sp. counter-balancing the direction of initial forced-turn between subjects. Our results showed that Artemia sp. had nearly chance level spontaneous alternation performance in the t-maze and plus maze whereas a higher than chance level turn alternation performance. These results support the ubiquity of turn alternation tendency across species and point at the lack of spontaneous alternation in Artemia sp.