As indicated in Fig. 1 and Table 3, three of the putative measures of novelty seeking were moderately to strongly correlated: degree of preference for a novel environment, head dipping, and rearing (all r > |0.46|). However, the correlations with novel environment preference seemed to be driven by strain A/J, which showed a strong aversion to the novel compartment. Removing this strain from the analysis reduced these values (r <|0.39|; data not shown). On the other hand, spontaneous alternation and object preference were generally uncorrelated with the other novelty seeking measures (r < |0.27|), except that the correlation of spontaneous alternation and rears tended to be higher (r = −0.46).
