Researchers use multiple informants’ reports to assess and examine behavior. However, informants’ reports commonly disagree. Informants’ reports often disagree in their perceived levels of a behavior (“low” vs. “elevated” mood), and examining multiple reports in a single study often results in inconsistent findings. Although researchers often espouse taking a multi-informant assessment approach, they frequently address informant discrepancies using techniques that treat discrepancies as measurement error. Yet, recent work indicates that researchers in a variety of fields often may be unable to justify treating informant discrepancies as measurement error. In this paper, the authors advance a framework (Operations Triad Model) outlining general principles for using and interpreting informants’ reports. Using the framework, researchers can test whether or not they can extract meaningful information about behavior from discrepancies among multiple informants’ reports. The authors provide supportive evidence for this framework and discuss its implications for hypothesis testing, study design, and quantitative review.

A manual-search experiment with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) explored dynamic object individuation in the tunnel effect: Subjects watched as a lemon rolled down a ramp and came to rest behind a tunnel (Occluder 1) and then as a kiwifruit emerged and became occluded at the end of its path behind a screen (Occluder 2). When the kiwifruit emerged at about the time that the lemon should have (had it continued its motion), subjects searched for food only behind Occluder 2-apparently perceiving the lemon to have transformed into a kiwifruit on the basis of spatiotemporally continuous motion. In contrast, when a brief pause interrupted the occlusion of the lemon and the emergence of the kiwifruit, monkeys searched for food behind both occluders. With further control conditions, this experiment demonstrates a spatiotemporal bias-similar to a bias found in adult visual perception-in the computation of object persistence in the context of a dynamic correspondence problem.

Humans frequently interact with strangers absent prior direct experience with their behavior. Some conjecture that this may have favored evolution of a cognitive system within the hominoid clade or perhaps the primate order to assign reputations based on third-party exchanges. However, non-primate species' acquisition of skills from experienced individuals, attention to communicative cues, and propensity to infer social rules suggests reputation inference may be more widespread. We utilized dogs' sensitivity to humans' social and communicative cues to explore whether dogs evidenced reputation-like inference for strangers through third-party interactions. Results indicated dogs spontaneously show reputation-like inference for strangers from indirect exchanges. Further manipulations revealed that dogs continued to evidence this ability despite reduction of specific components of the observed interactions, including reduction of visual social cues (i.e., face-to-face contact between the participants in the interaction) and the nature of the recipient (i.e., living, animate agent versus living, inanimate self-propelled agent). Dogs also continued to demonstrate reputation-like inference when local enhancement was controlled and in a begging paradigm. However, dogs did not evidence reputation-like inference when the observed interaction was inadvertent.

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Organisms must often make predictions about the trajectories of moving objects. However, often these objects become hidden. To later locate such objects, the organism must maintain a representation of the object in memory and generate an expectation about where it will later appear. We explored adult dogs' knowledge and use of the solidity principle (that one solid object cannot pass through another solid object) by evaluating search behavior. Subjects watched as a treat rolled down an inclined tube into a box. The box either did or did not contain a solid wall dividing it in half. To Wnd the treat, subjects had to modify their search behavior based on the presence or absence of the wall, which either did or did not block the treat's trajectory. Dogs correctly searched the near location when the barrier was present and the far location when the barrier was absent. They displayed this behavior from the Wrst trial, as well as performed correctly when trial types were intermingled. These results suggest that dogs direct their searches in accordance with the solidity principle.