http://www.tolweb.org/onlinecontributors/app;jsessionid=3E87A8FA157677E7473AAF2B7C784F1D?page=TeacherResourceViewSupportMaterial&service=external&sp=4

Ethograms:

“The study of animal behavior begins with a library of behaviors, called an ethogram. An ethogram is a list of species-specific behaviors describing the elements and function of each behavior. Normally, the best ethograms are functional; they are organized into categories that reflect meaningful distinctions to the animal.

The word ethogram is often used confusingly to mean two different things: the species ethogram, and the experimental ethogram. The species ethogram is a master list of all known behaviors for the species. Whereas the experimental ethogram is a distillation and reorganization of this list into the behaviors that are relevant to the hypothesis being tested. Thus very unlike many of the automated behavioral neuroscience paradigms, where a huge number of individual variables are produced, a well designed ethological study will narrow down the behaviors observed to exactly the right ones to test the specific hypotheses at hand.

Experimental ethograms are usually constructed to be exclusive and exhaustive. These terms refer to the operationalization (i.e. the rules the observer uses to make decisions) of the categories in the ethogram.

An exclusive ethogram is one where each behavior performed by the animal can only be categorized as one behavior in the ethogram – that is, the animal can only be recorded as doing one thing at a time. So rather like differential diagnoses in medicine, an exclusive ethogram will often define a behavior by exclusion (for example the postures involved in still and alert and sleep are very similar, so the definitions for each involve exclusionary statements so that the observer can distinguish them).

An exhaustive ethogram is one where every behavior performed by the animal has a category in the ethogram, this is normally achieved in an experimental ethogram by lumping all the behaviors of no interest to the hypothesis being tested in an ‘other’ category. This greatly speeds the recording of behavior, as behaviors irrelevant to the hypothesis can simply be ignored.
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