Feeding latency
= Feeding latency
<Feeding latency> is the elapsed time from a defined starting event to a defined feeding event. An experiment might measure from food presentation to an individual's first peck or to the first bird feeding in a <social group>. Those endpoints answer different questions. The start, the feeding criterion and the observation limit must all be specified.
In an original example, an animal feeds after $20\,\mathrm s$ without a novel object and $80\,\mathrm s$ with one nearby: the novelty-associated increase is $60\,\mathrm s$. Another changes from $100$ to $130\,\mathrm s$, an increase of $30\,\mathrm s$. Comparing only the two novel-condition times reverses the ordering obtained by comparing their changes.
A group-level first-feeding time is $T_{\mathrm{group}}=\min(T_1,\ldots,T_n)$, if $T_i$ denotes each member's time under that same group trial. This identity requires no independence assumption. It also shows why a group endpoint cannot be treated as though it were a measurement of every member: one early feeder determines the recorded minimum.
If recording ends after $180\,\mathrm s$ before feeding occurs, the observation is subject to <right censoring>: the time exceeds the recorded limit. Replacing it by an observed time of exactly $180\,\mathrm s$, or by infinity, changes what was measured.
A finch study combined whether groups fed at all with <feeding latency> comparisons in familiar and novel-object conditions. Keeping those outcomes separate preserves information that an average of observed feeding times alone could lose.<Effects of domestication on neophobia: A comparison between the domesticated Bengalese finch and its wild ancestor, the white-rumped munia by Kenta Suzuki and others>[Abstract and Results: feeding occurrence and latency under novel-object conditions]{ref}