Handedness in Cats - Lab Exercises

Exercise 1: Help Nikol figure out how to best characterize handedness in cats

1. Examine the data contained in "CatData2.xls". Information on the file and the variables it contains is included in "". The same data as a text file are in CatData2.txt
2. Nikol says: "Here is my data for Friday. I am looking for presence of handedness in cats with a moving target. If they show handedness,
   I then want to look for differences between the adults and kittens, between males and females and then between the type of moving targets. Does preference change according to object type, car, mouse, ball? Is there a difference in hand preference between males and females? Do kittens show a preference different from adults? Any questions, let me know."
3. "Apparently, I missed that I needed to send a better descriptor of the data that was sent to you. I am testing handedness in cats as related moving objects. Handedness has been tested in cats with stationary objects represented by food, because similar to primates, cats will manipulate their food with their paws. This leads to a question, do they present handedness. Moving targets have not been tested with out practice and reward system. Mine is mimicking live prey items presented to randomly picked, altered cats that will be tested without practice and without a clear reward system. The cats are presented with a r/c car inside a plastic clear box. 20 touches will be recorded when the cat reaches inside with either paw. There are three repetitions of this with each animal. The average time in seconds for each touch is recorded from the three trials. This first object is to test for the presence of handedness. If present then kittens are tested as well and two more objects are introduced. A moving mouse (plastic) and a rolling ball. Each item is tested three times. The trials with each object are separated to avoid learned behavior. If handedness is present, I want to know if it changes with the type of object, with age, or with sex. Each trial listed states the type of object used as well as the trial number. 20 touches were recorded and for ease both the number of right and left paw touches were listed. The names of the cats are for ease of identifying the animal and finding the same animal later on and is not crucial to the data. I hope this clears up confusion. Let me know if there is anything else I can clear up or any questions I can answer. "