A rat in a complicated maze with many arms, some of which are baited with food, will: once finding food in an arm, return only to that arm. explore the maze in a random, haphazard fashion due to its complexity. explore the entire maze but often revisit arms that contained food. rarely return to an arm it has previously visited.

According to Olton and Samuelson, the rat rarely returns to an arm that has previously visited. Olton and Samuelson built a radial arm maze, baited with food in some arms. The purpose was to test spacial learning and memory in rats. They came to the conclusion that rats have a fantastic memory for visited and unvisited arms. The rats tried to visit all of the arms independently of the food and remembered which were already visited or not even after changing the arms around.