Observer effects occur when the behavior of studied organisms changes in response to researcher presence (McDougall, 2012). Given the proportion of human directed vigilance, we recommend that all studies that use human observers to record animal behavior consider human-directed vigilance, record the number of observers, as well as the observer-focal animal distance, to check for these effects. Our results support the hypothesis that human pressure gradients influence animal behavior. We found no other consistent differences in capuchin monkey behavior across the measured human pressure gradients, although capuchins directed a high proportion of their vigilance toward humans (29% in adults and 47% in infants). We found that capuchin monkeys fed less when human observers were closer to the focal individual, when more observers were present, and when capuchins were closer to the research base. We conducted this study over 4 months in the Pacaya-Samiria Nature Reserve, Peru, and collected 199 two-minute focal samples of capuchin behavior. ![]() We investigated the effect of human pressure gradients on a remote population of large-headed capuchins, Sapajus macrocephalus, looking specifically at the effects of number of observers, distance to observers, and distance to the research base. These effects are rarely explicitly investigated, often due to the assumption that the study animal is habituated to or unaffected by a human’s presence. Human observers often are present when researchers record animal behavior, which can create observer effects.
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