Prolonged animal observation by use of digitized videodisplays

Quantitative assessment of animal behavior requires not only much time and good training, but is always dependent upon the interpretation of the observer. Therefore we employed a commonly-used microcomputer to analyze, without intervention of a human observer, the picture obtained via videocamera, a digitizer and disk-drive. The program, written in BASIC and listed in Appendix I, generates pictures of the monitored animal in the graphics of the computer. These pictures can be analyzed immediately or stored on disk for further analysis.