Effects of Adolescent Caffeine Consumption on Addictive Behaviors in Adulthood

Caffeine is found in a variety of beverages such as soda, coffee, and tea, which are consumed by many people on a daily basis. Because of how commonly caffeine is consumed, it is important to discover the effects adolescent caffeine consumption may have on adult addiction behaviors. A rat model was used to explore the potential effects of adolescent caffeine consumption. Rats consumed caffeine during their adolescent period and underwent behavioral tests in adulthood to assess whether they displayed behaviors associated with enhanced vulnerability to drug addiction. Behavioral tests used to assess addictive behaviors in adulthood included drug self-administration (SA) and a Pavlovian Conditioned Approach (PCA) task. Our findings show that rats that consume caffeine during adolescence self-administer cocaine in adulthood at a higher rate than controls. Rats consuming caffeine during adolescence also have a higher breakpoint for cocaine self-administration in adulthood than controls, indicating that adolescent caffeine consumption increases motivation for drug taking. We also found that a greater percentage of rats consuming caffeine during early adolescence displayed “sign-tracking” behaviors during the PCA task that has been associated with altered dopamine signaling and correlated with increased drug self-administration. While the results were not as clear, a similar trend was also seen in rats that consumed caffeine during their late adolescent period. Overall, these findings illustrate that adolescent caffeine consumption enhances addictive behaviors in adulthood

Mobile phone app aimed at improving iron intake and bioavailability in premenopausal women: a qualitative evaluation

BACKGROUND: Low iron intake can lead to iron deficiency, which can result in impaired health and iron-deficiency anemia. A mobile phone app, combining successful dietary strategies to increase bioavailable iron with strategies for behavior change, such as goal setting, monitoring, feedback, and resources for knowledge acquisition, was developed with the aim to increase bioavailable iron intake in premenopausal women. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the content, usability, and acceptability of a mobile phone app designed to improve intake of bioavailable dietary iron. METHODS: Women aged 18-50 years with an Android mobile phone were invited to participate. Over a 2-week period women were asked to interact with the app. Following this period, semistructured focus groups with participants were conducted. Focus groups were audio recorded and analyzed via an inductive open-coding method using the qualitative analysis software NVivo 10. Themes were identified and frequency of code occurrence was calculated. RESULTS: Four focus groups (n=26) were conducted (age range 19-36 years, mean 24.7, SD 5.2). Two themes about the app\u27s functionality were identified (frequency of occurrence in brackets): interface and design (134) and usability (86). Four themes about the app\u27s components were identified: goal tracker (121), facts (78), photo diary (40), and games (46). A number of suggestions to improve the interface and design of the app were provided and will inform the ongoing development of the app. CONCLUSIONS: This research indicates that participants are interested in iron and their health and are willing to use an app utilizing behavior change strategies to increase intake of bioavailable iron. The inclusion of information about the link between diet and health, monitoring and tracking of the achievement of dietary goals, and weekly reviews of goals were also seen as valuable components of the app and should be considered in mobile health apps aimed at adult women

The nature of phenotypic variation in Pavlovian conditioning

Pavlovian conditioning procedures result in dramatic individual differences in the topography of learnt behaviors in rats: When the temporary insertion of a lever into an operant chamber is paired with food pellets, some rats (known as sign-trackers) predominantly interact with the lever, while others (known as goal-trackers) predominantly approach the food well. Two experiments examined the sensitivity of these two behaviors to changing reinforcement contingencies in groups of males and female rats exhibiting the different phenotypes (i.e., sign-trackers and goal-trackers). In both phenotypes, behavior oriented to the food well was more sensitive to contingency changes (e.g., a reversal in which of two levers was reinforced) than was lever-oriented behavior. That is, the nature of the two behaviors differed independently of the rats in which they were manifest. These results indicate that the behavioral phenotypes reflect the parallel operation of a stimulus-stimulus associative process that gives rise to food-well activity and a stimulus-response process that gives rise to leveroriented activity, rather than the operation of a single process (e.g., stimulus-stimulus) that generates both behaviors

Barriers to Complete Adult Vaccinations in Vermont

Introduction/Background: • Child immunization is nearly universally accepted as an effective preventative measure against infectious diseases, yet adult immunization rates continue to lag behind recommended levels. • Epidemiological trends suggest a correlation between vaccine administration and decreased rates of significant morbidity and mortality, hospitalization and emergency department visits, work absenteeism, and illness associated expenses. • As of 2010, Vermont is failing to meet its adult immunization goals by 13-43%. • This study aims to understand and identify specific barriers to adult immunization in Vermont.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1076/thumbnail.jp

Understanding Factors Contributing to Suboptimal Rates of Childhood Vaccinations in Vermont

Introduction: Nationally, childhood immunizations have proven themselves invaluable in preventing contagious diseases and their associated morbidity and mortality. Nonetheless, vaccines have become increasingly controversial, with a growing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children. Primary reasons given for vaccination refusal include fears of side effects and the belief that the target diseases are not harmful. Those parents who refuse to vaccinate their children generally have higher levels of education and income. An additional population of under-vaccinated children who have received limited recommended vaccinations has been identified and often comes from a lower socioeconomic level. Unimmunized children have been associated with recent disease outbreaks, placing other individuals at risk and increasing the controversy about childhood vaccinations. Nationally, Vermont has one of the highest rates of unvaccinated children with recent data showing these rates are continuing to increase.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1057/thumbnail.jp

MC/DC-pohjainen testivalinta dynaamiselle symboliselle suoritukselle

Ensuring the correct operation of a software system is a relevant part of any software development process, but especially important for safety critical software systems used in aircrafts where failures can have fatal consequences and extreme reliability is required. As there is no official record of a software error being the main cause of an aircraft crash up to date, these systems also seem to be very reliable in practice. This success can at least partially be attributed to the aviation software certification process, which places a set of strict requirements on the system that must be taken into account during its development. One such requirement, applicable only to the most critical systems, is showing complete modified condition/decision coverage on the implementation of the system using tests generated from the system specification. Modified condition/decision coverage is a very demanding form of code coverage, whose purpose is to show both that sufficient testing has been performed to ensure correct operation, and that the implementation is correct in terms of the specification. As generating the tests by hand is very demanding, in terms of this work we study how automation can be used to facilitate this process. This thesis presents goal constraints, a novel extension to dynamic symbolic execution, which makes automatic generation of a set of tests satisfying modified condition/decision coverage possible. The goal constraints are essentially additional constraints on the values of variables instrumented into the program source code. They can be used during dynamic symbolic execution both to direct the testing process, and to select test cases based on the code coverage they provide. We present how goal constraints can be automatically generated and instrumented into the source code of a program written in the C programming language, and how support for goal constraints is implemented in an automated software testing tool called LIME Concolic Tester. The implementation is also evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of automated test generation in the context of aviation software development are discussed.Ohjelmistojärjestelmän oikean toiminnallisuuden varmistaminen on olennainen osa mitä tahansa ohjelmistokehitysprosessia, mutta erityisen tärkeää lentokoneissa käytettäville turvallisuuskriittisille järjestelmille, joissa ongelmilla voi olla vakavat seuraukset. Koska yksikään lentokone ei ole vielä toistaiseksi pudonnut virallisten lähteiden mukaan suoraan ohjelmistovirheen seurauksena, nämä järjestelmät vaikuttavat myös täyttävän niille asetetut luotettavuusvaatimukset erittäin hyvin. Hyvästä menestyksestä voidaan ainakin osittain kiittää lentokoneohjelmistojen kelpoistamisprosessia, joka määrittelee järjestelmille joukon tiukkoja vaatimuksia, jotka on otettava huomioon niiden kehityksen aikana. Yksi näistä vaatimuksista on täydellinen MC/DC-peittävyys järjestelmän toteutukselle käyttäen testejä, jotka on tuotettu järjestelmän määritelmästä. Tämä vaatimus koskee ainoastaan kaikista kriittisimpiä järjestelmiä, ja sen tarkoitus on osoittaa paitsi että toteutus on määritelmän mukainen, myös että toteutus ei sisällä ei-toivottua toiminnallisuutta. Koska MC/DC-testien tuottaminen käsin on hyvin työlästä, tutkimme tämän työn puitteissa miten automaatiota voidaan soveltaa helpottamaan tätä prosessia. Tämä työ esittelee tavoiterajoitteet, uuden laajennksen dynaamiselle symboliselle suoritukselle, joka mahdollistaa automaattisen MC/DC-testien tuottamisen. Tavoiterajoitteet ovat olennaisesti ohjelman lähdekoodiin lisättyjä lisävaatimuksia siinä esiintyvien muuttujien arvoille, ja niitä voidaan käyttää dynaamisen symbolisen suorituksen aikana sekä ohjaamaan testausta, että valitsemaan kiinnostavia testejä. Esitämme miten tavoiterajoitteet voidaan automaattisesti tuottaa ja instrumentoida C-kielisen ohjelman lähdekoodiin, ja miten tuki tavoiterajoitteille on toteutettu automaattiseen ohjelmistotestaustyökaluun nimeltä LIME Concolic Tester. Esitämme myös miten arvion toteutuksesta, ja keskustelemme mitä hyviä ja huonoja puolia liittyy automaattiseen ohjelmistotestaukseen lentokoneohjelmistojen kelpoistamisprosessin näkökulmasta

Toward an interdisciplinary science of consumption

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88117/1/j.1749-6632.2011.06163.x.pd

Individual variation in incentive salience attribution and accumbens dopamine transporter expression and function

Cues (conditioned stimuli; CSs) associated with rewards can come to motivate behavior, but there is considerable individual variation in their ability to do so. For example, a lever-CS that predicts food reward becomes attractive, wanted, and elicits reward-seeking behavior to a greater extent in some rats (“sign-trackers”; STs), than others (“goal-trackers”; GTs). Variation in dopamine (DA) neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core is thought to contribute to such individual variation. Given that the DA transporter (DAT) exerts powerful regulation over DA signaling, we characterized the expression and function of the DAT in the accumbens of STs and GTs. STs showed greater DAT surface expression in ventral striatal synaptosomes than GTs, and ex vivo fast-scan cyclic voltammetry recordings of electrically-evoked DA release confirmed enhanced DAT function in STs, as indicated by faster DA uptake, specifically in the NAc core. Consistent with this, systemic amphetamine (AMPH) produced greater inhibition of DA uptake in STs than in GTs. Furthermore, injection of AMPH directly into the NAc core enhanced lever-directed approach in STs, presumably by amplifying the incentive value of the CS, but had no effect on goal tracking behavior. On the other hand, there were no differences between STs and GTs in electrically-evoked DA release in slices, or in total ventral striatal DA content. We conclude that greater DAT surface expression may facilitate the attribution of incentive salience to discrete reward cues. Investigating this variability in animal sub-populations may help explain why some people abuse drugs, while others do not

Goals and targets : a developmental puzzle about sensitivity to others’ actions

Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to be limited by their abilities to represent the observed action motorically at the time it occurs? And why does their sensitivity to action sometimes manifest itself differently in dishabituation, pupil dilation and anticipatory looking? Solving these twin puzzles is critical for understanding humans’ earliest sensitivity to others’ actions. After introducing the puzzles, this paper argues that solving them may require identifying multiple, distinct processes for tracking the targets and goals of actions