Anecdotes in animal behaviour

Kret, Mariska E.; Roth, Tom S.

doi:10.1163/1568539x-00003600

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Notably, throughout this history, animal cognition researchers have often sought to improve how we study animal cognition. They foregrounded debates on experimenter bias (Pfungst, 1911;Yerkes, 1915), parsimony (Morgan, 1894) and ecological validity (Hare, 2001), and the importance of a wide range of anecdotal (Kret & Roth, 2020;Ramsay & Teichroeb, 2019), observational (Boesch, 2021) and experimental data (Washburn et al, 1994;Yasukawa & Bonnie, 2017). However, whether the field has vastly improved its methods along these lines is debated.…”

Section: The Hidden Side Of Animal Cognition Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hidden Side of Animal Cognition Research: Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Bias, Replicability and Scientific Practice

Farrar¹,

Ostojić²,

Clayton³

2021

Preprint

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Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field as a whole, but less so in their own work. Despite sometimes (39.7% of responses) or often (38.8% of responses) hoping for one result over another, researchers reported that they could often (45.8% of responses) or always (38.4% of responses) detach from any biases to perform objectively fair tests of animal cognition. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan’s canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses, and researchers self-reported that a median of 80% of their studies had been published. Their free-text responses suggested a stronger publication bias against negative and inconclusive results, and results that questioned “preferred” theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves — however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, and 44.7% of researchers agreed that their own area (44.7% of responses), or other areas (73.0% of responses) of research could experience a ‘replication crisis’ if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants’ free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, and highlighted many possible improvements. Overall, these data provide a picture of active researchers’ beliefs about the animal cognition research processes that can be used to inform debates on where and how the field can improve.

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Section: The Hidden Side Of Animal Cognition Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hidden Side of Animal Cognition Research: Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Bias, Replicability and Scientific Practice

Farrar¹,

Ostojić²,

Clayton³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…37 Some systematic attempts have been made to use massive compendiums of anecdotes (solicited from lab and field workers alike) to implicate particular kinds of mental representations (e.g., O'Connell, 1995;Whiten & Byrne, 1988). Although scholars have moved away from the use of anecdotes in this manner (see Ramsay & Teichroeb, 2019), the anecdotally inclined reader will be heartened to discover that the journal Behaviour has recently implemented a formal mechanism for submitting and archiving new ones (Kret & Roth, 2020).…”

Section: Why the Central Claims Of Folk Physics Still Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Comparative Psychology Crack its Toughest Nut?

Povinelli¹

2020

AB&C

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What is the likelihood that humans will ever determine if other animals engage in higher-order thinking? In examining what has happened in the twenty years since the publication of our book, Folk Physics for Apes, I conclude that comparative psychologists, the academic stalwarts charged with making progress on this front, are stuck in a series of intractable, and largely unacknowledged, conceptual problems. Because higher-order mental states depend on the existence of first-order, perceptually-based representations of objects and events, and because those first-order representations are necessary and sufficient to explain current experimental and observational results, the approaches deployed by comparative psychologists are doomed to failure. I examine this Asymmetric Dependency Problem in detail and show how the failure to confront its implications leads to viciously circular arguments that cannot be fixed within the current paradigm of research. Next, I offer a seven-step method for isolating the common structural flaw in any given experiment, and work through several examples. Finally, I examine the central claims that my colleagues and I made in Folk Physics through the lens of the Asymmetric Dependency Problem and current research trends. Although the optimism we expressed that experimental approaches could implicate the presence of higher-order thinking in animals requires considerable dampening, the challenges we isolated remain as vital today as they were twenty years ago.

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“…In animal behavior, anecdotes or observations of infrequent behavior are often considered important ( 1 ) because they can generate novel hypotheses and stimulate new avenues for behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary studies ( 2 ). However, owing to their rarity, these behaviors may not even be noticed in the natural field or may not be documented with sufficient sample sizes to enable statistical analyses ( 3 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic recording of rare behaviors of wild animals using video bio-loggers with on-board light-weight outlier detector

Tanigaki,

Otsuka,

et al. 2023

PNAS Nexus

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Rare behaviors displayed by wild animals can generate new hypotheses; however, observing such behaviors may be challenging. While recent technological advancements, such as bio-loggers, may assist in documenting rare behaviors, the limited running time of battery-powered bio-loggers is insufficient to record rare behaviors when employing high-cost sensors (e.g. video cameras). In this study, we propose an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled bio-logger that automatically detects outlier readings from always-on low-cost sensors, e.g. accelerometers, indicative of rare behaviors in target animals, without supervision by researchers, subsequently activating high-cost sensors to record only these behaviors. We implemented an on-board outlier detector via knowledge distillation by building a lightweight outlier classifier supervised by a high-cost outlier behavior detector trained in an unsupervised manner. The efficacy of AI bio-loggers has been demonstrated on seabirds, where videos and sensor data captured by the bio-loggers have enabled the identification of some rare behaviors, facilitating analyses of their frequency, and potential factors underlying these behaviors. This approach offers a means of documenting previously overlooked rare behaviors, augmenting our understanding of animal behavior.

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Anecdotes in animal behaviour

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

The Hidden Side of Animal Cognition Research: Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Bias, Replicability and Scientific Practice

The Hidden Side of Animal Cognition Research: Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Bias, Replicability and Scientific Practice

Can Comparative Psychology Crack its Toughest Nut?

Automatic recording of rare behaviors of wild animals using video bio-loggers with on-board light-weight outlier detector

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