AROUSAL MEDIATES RELATIONS AMONG MEDIAL PAW PREFERENCE, LATERAL PAW PREFERENCE, AND SPATIAL PREFERENCE IN THE MOUSE

Rodents exhibit two well-documented behavioural lateralities: spatial preference and paw preference. Waters and Denenberg [36] have identifi ed two seemingly independent factors of paw preference: medial and lat eral paw preference. In the present work, the relations among spatial preference (SP), medial paw preference (MPP), and lateral paw preferen ce (LPP) during states of high and low arousal were examined. These pr eferences were measured in terms of direction, which describes the sid e of the preference regardless of strength, and degree, which describe s the strength of the preference regardless of direction. A strong pos itive correlation between LPP and SP was found during periods of high, but not low, arousal. A negative correlation between the degree compo nents of LPP and MPP was found during the low, but nor high, arousal p eriods. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.