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Behaviorists often spend a good deal of time making preliminary observations of the animals they intend to study, recording behaviors by describing them, without interpretation, and then coming up with a list of common behaviors, broken down into components as much as possible, with objective words or phrases to describe them.

Watch the following animation, and think about how you would break down the sequence into parts, and how you would describe those parts.

(Mouse over the image to start the animation. It will play once. To play it again, mouse away from it, then over it again. Netscape 4.x: "reload" page or click on image to re-run animation.)

Once you have written down the behavioral components you observed, go on to the next page.