Determining Social Preference of Holstein Cows Based on Stall Selection

Early behavior work with dairy cattle focused on the agonistic interactions and dominance structure. This current behavior project focused on determining social preferences rather than dominance. Two lots of 130 Holstein cows at the Andrews University Dairy were observed 8 nights over the course of 6 weeks. Data was collected in the evening after milking and feeding to allow the cattle time to retreat to the freestalls to ruminant and rest. The ear tag number of each cow that was lying down was recorded on a diagram of the lot in which all the stalls were numbered. The data collected was statistically analyzed to determine if any cows lay near another specific cow repeatedly, more often than would be expected by chance. This was used to determine then if the cows at the Andrews University Dairy Farm have specific herdmates that they prefer to lie next to or near. The analysis showed that the cows did not lie next to the same cow a significant number of times. The cows that did were too few in number to be considered significant. Stall occupancy was also analyzed and the feed aisle sections of the lots were more frequently occupied than others potentially indicating greater desirability

P-11 Determining Social Preference of Holstein Cows Based on Stall Selection

Cows, like other animals, have dominance hierarchies but there is anecdotal evidence that cows also have preferred herd mates with whom they spend more time. This research project sought to gain more detail about cow social groups at the Andrews University Dairy by determining the relative social ranking of cows within two different lots and the social groupings within each lot. The dominance ranking was inferred by observing which cows occupy the more desirable stalls. The social groupings were then determined by which cows lie near each other more often over the course of the observations

The Neural Correlates of Persuasion: A Common Network Across Cultures and Media

Persuasion is at the root of countless social exchanges in which one person or group is motivated to have another share its beliefs, desires, or behavioral intentions. Here, we report the first three functional magnetic resonance imaging studies to investigate the neurocognitive networks associated with feeling persuaded by an argument. In the first two studies, American and Korean participants, respectively, were exposed to a number of text-based persuasive messages. In both Study 1 and Study 2, feeling persuaded was associated with increased activity in posterior superior temporal sulcus bilaterally, temporal pole bilaterally, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest a discrete set of underlying mechanisms in the moment that the persuasion process occurs, and are strengthened by the fact that the results replicated across two diverse linguistic and cultural groups. Additionally, a third study using region-of-interest analyses demonstrated that neural activity in this network was also associated with persuasion when a sample of American participants viewed video-based messages. In sum, across three studies, including two different cultural groups and two types of media, persuasion was associated with a consistent network of regions in the brain. Activity in this network has been associated with social cognition and mentalizing and is consistent with models of persuasion that emphasize the importance of social cognitive processing in determining the efficacy of persuasive communication

Investigating Game Mechanics that Target Players' Self-Control While Maintaining Engagement

© {Owner/Author | ACM} 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3242671.3242698.Whenever someone chooses to study instead of going to a party, or forgo dessert after dinner, that person is exercising self-control. Self-control is essential for achieving long-term goals, but isn't easy. Games present a compelling opportunity to engage in tasks that allow a player to exercise and improve self-control, and consequently provide data about a person's cognitive capacity to exert self-control. However, exercising self-control can be effortful and depleting, which makes incorporating it into a game design that maintains engagement and quality of experience a challenge. We present the design of game mechanics for exercising and improving self-control, and an initial study that effectively demonstrates that games can be designed to engage a broad level of self-control processes without negatively affecting player engagement and experience. Our results also show that player performance is connected to trait-level self-control. We discuss how (for example) players with low trait self-control can therefore be identified, and games intended to improve or exercise self-control can dynamically adapt to this information.Funder 1, NSERC Discovery Grant 2016-04422 || Funder 2, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Grant 492970-2016 || Funder 3, NSERC CREATE Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research (SWaGUR) Grant 479724-2016 || Funder 4, Ontario Early Researcher Award ER15-11-18

Effects of self-transcendence on neural responses to persuasive messages and health behavior change

Self-transcendence refers to a shift in mindset from focusing on self-interests to the well-being of others. We offer an integrative neural model of self-transcendence in the context of persuasive messaging by examining the mechanisms of self-transcendence in promoting receptivity to health messages and behavior change. Specifically, we posited that focusing on values and activities that transcend the self can allow people to see that their self-worth is not tied to a specific behavior in question, and in turn become more receptive to subsequent, otherwise threatening health information. To test whether inducing self-transcendent mindsets before message delivery would help overcome defensiveness and increase receptivity, we used two priming tasks, affirmation and compassion, to elicit a transcendent mindset among 220 sedentary adults. As preregistered, those who completed a self-transcendence task before health message exposure, compared with controls, showed greater increases in objectively logged levels of physical activity throughout the following month. In the brain, self-transcendence tasks up-regulated activity in a region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, chosen for its role in positive valuation and reward processing. During subsequent health message exposure, self-transcendence priming was associated with increased activity in subregions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, implicated in self-related processing and positive valuation, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior. The present findings suggest that having a positive self-transcendent mindset can increase behavior change, in part by increasing neural receptivity to health messaging

Spirally-patterned pinhole arrays for long-term fluorescence cell imaging

Fluorescence cell imaging using a fluorescence microscope is an extensively used technique to examine the cell nucleus, internal structures, and other cellular molecules with fluorescence response time and intensity. However, it is difficult to perform high resolution cell imaging for a long period of time with this technique due to necrosis and apoptosis depending on the type and subcellular location of the damage caused by phototoxicity. A large number of studies have been performed to resolve this problem, but researchers have struggled to meet the challenge between cellular viability and image resolution. In this study, we employ a specially designed disc to reduce cell damage by controlling total fluorescence exposure time without deterioration of the image resolution. This approach has many advantages such as, the apparatus is simple, cost-effective, and easily integrated into the optical pathway through a conventional fluorescence microscope. © 2015 The Royal Society of Chemistry.FALS