title: Ten ways to improve the quality of descriptions of whole-animal movement.
abstract: The demand for replicability of behavioral results across laboratories is viewed as a burden in behavior genetics. We demonstrate how it can become an asset offering a quantitative criterion that guides the design of better ways to describe behavior. Passing the high benchmark dictated by the replicability demand requires less stressful and less restraining experimental setups, less noisy data, individually customized cutoff points between the building blocks of movement, and less variable yet discriminative dynamic representations that would capture more faithfully the nature of the behavior, unmasking similarities and differences and revealing novel animal-centered measures. Here we review ten tools that enhance replicability without compromising discrimination. While we demonstrate the usefulness of these tools in the context of inbred mouse exploratory behavior they can readily be used in any study involving a high-resolution analysis of spatial behavior. Viewing replicability as a design concept and using the ten methodological improvements may prove useful in many fields not necessarily related to spatial behavior.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operation Research, Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Yoav
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Benjamini
authors.forename: Dina
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lipkind
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Horev
authors.forename: Ehud
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fonio
authors.forename: Neri
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kafkafi
authors.forename: Ilan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Golani
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000830:Animals, Laboratory / Q000502:physiology; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena / Q000502:physiology; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D008954:Models, Biological; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D013037:Spatial Behavior / Q000502:physiology*