Measuring Unpredictable Maternal Sensory Signals

Entropy provides a measure of the predictability of a series of behaviors. This approach is used in Davis et al. (PNAS 2017) and Molet et al. (2016, Translational Psychiatry) to characterize early life experience in rodents and humans. You can read about Behavioral Entropy (coding the data and computing the entropy).

You can also view the Training Manual for coding maternal behavior signals from Videos of Maternal-Child Interactions and the description of CCBER software package to estimate behavioral entropy rate. (See Davis et al., PNAS, 2017 for additional details)