The test serves great purpose in comparative psychology,[6] wherein non-human animals are studied to investigate differences within and between species with the aims of applying their findings to a greater understanding of human behavior.
[10] Several experiments conducted in the 1950s found reason to refute this theory, demonstrating SAB to be a stimulus-based behavior, as opposed to one which is response-based.
[8] Motivation: As movement into either arm of the maze isn't traced, nor reinforced, the animal must have a purpose which is fulfilled by SAB that is not exclusively cognitive.
Estes and Schoeffler (1955) proposed that SAB originated as an adaptive behavior which enabled animals to gather information related to the distribution of resources needed for survival (e.g. food and shelter).
With this logic, an animal is likely motivated to enter environments in an alternating pattern, because they will have already exhausted the resources from that which they most recently visited.
[14] This allows one to build, and continuously update, cognitive spatial maps of novel environments as they are being explored, so that they are able to return to areas which they distinguish as less familiar – thereby optimizing information gathering strategies.
[16] Variation in physiological ability (e.g. motor function), did not account for this, instead, the observations were attributed to gradual degradation in spatial learning.
[13][16] Anatomical changes to limbic and non-limbic pathways associated with normal and pathological aging in rodents correlate with the decrease in SAB.
These include the neurochemical pathways in the hippocampus and basal forebrain– both of which are associated with spatial working memory and learning in humans, as well as in rodents.
[18] These findings may suggest a decrease in exploratory behavior as a result of associated neurobiological changes, which implicate the capacity and function of spatial working memory.
[19] The apparatus used for spontaneous alternation testing takes multiple forms – the T-maze and the Y-maze being those which are most commonly used in experimental psychology.
[22] The six-month-old infants had no significant interchange with which toy they chose in subsequent trials, so the pattern of spontaneous alternation was not present.
[22] When testing the effects of stress on spontaneous alteration in mice, two different methods of stressors have been involved in research studies.
Life-sized mazes are impractical to create, and lack naturalism in their implementation, eliciting a number of confounding variables related to social desirability and demand characteristics.