Counter culture: causes, extent and solutions of systematic bias in the analysis of behavioural counts.

ABSTRACT: We often quantify the rate at which a behaviour occurs by counting the number of times it occurs within a specific, short observation period. Measuring behaviour in such a way is typically unavoidable but induces error. This error acts to systematically reduce effect sizes, including metrics of particular interest to behavioural and evolutionary ecologists such as R² , repeatability (intra-class correlation, ICC) and heritability. Through introducing a null model, the Poisson process, for modelling the frequency of behaviour, we give a mechanistic explanation of how this problem arises and demonstrate how it makes comparisons between studies and species problematic, because the magnitude of the error depends on how frequently the behaviour has been observed as well as how

SUBMITTER: Pick JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10081455 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature