Exploring the neural correlates of e-Assurance and multi-faced risk in e-Commerce

El comercio electrónico ha permitido a multitud de pequeñas empresas exponer sus productos y aumentar su público objetivo potencial. Pese a la relativa facilidad de introducirse en este mercado, la mayor dificultad estriba en eliminar las barreras que limitan a los consumidores comprar online. Una de las vías que poseen mayor potencial para aumentar la confianza online y reducir el riesgo percibido es dotar a su web de señales de confianza, entre las que destacan los certificados externos, ratings de consumidores y políticas de privacidad. Este estudio precisamente usa una técnica neurocientífica (resonancia magnética funcional) junto a cuestionarios con el propósito de esclarecer objetivamente el procesamiento neurológico de esas tres señales de seguridad online. Además, usando estas nuevas herramientas, pretende dilucidar la debatida dimensionalidad del riesgo percibido. Los resultados aconsejarán a comercios online la señal más útil a incluir en sus webs y se concretarán las dimensiones del riesgo percibido.E-commerce has allowed many small firms sell their products and broaden their target. Despite the relative ease in which vendors enter this marketplace, the strongest difficulty is to decrease barriers which discourage online purchases. One of the most useful ways to increase consumer online trust and reduce perceived risk is creating trust mechanisms in web sites, such as seals of approval, consumer ratings and privacy policies. Specifically, this study applies a neuroscientific tool (functional magnetic resonance imaging- fMRI-) together with questionnaires with the aim to clear up the neural processing of those trust signals (e-assurances). Furthermore, using fMRI, we explore the “under-debated” dimensionality of perceived risk. The findings will advise online retailers with the most useful e-assurance to include in their websites as well as will specify the dimensions of perceived risk

Evaluating the neural mechanisms of exposure and retrieval of hedonic and utilitarian banners: A fMRI study

This study was supported by two Excellence Project awarded by the Junta de Andalusia through FEDER [REF: B-SEJ-220-UGR18 and A-SEJ-426-UGR20] , a grant from the Fundacion Ramon Areces [CISP18A6208] and a grant from the Plan of the Vice-rectorate of Research of the UGR [Program 20, application 82] . Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada/CBUATraditional psychological theories of message persuasion typically conclude that messages that are able to facilitate an optimal allocation of cognitive resources in the audience will increase memory encoding, will be better retrieved and recalled, and will likely be more persuasive. The growing competition in online advertising has led to a need to evaluate which type of banners are able to allocate cognitive resources more efficiently, as this has a positive impact on the ability to remember the banner and potentially increase the purchase frequency of the advertised product. By means of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), this study provides the first evidence of neural differences during the exposure and reimagination of two widely used banner appeals; namely, hedonic (i.e., banners that vividly emphasize the social, personal, and experiential benefits of buying the product) and utilitarian (i.e., banners focused on informative, convenient, and functional arguments). Our findings reveal that, when compared to utilitarian banners, hedonic static advertisements engage stronger neurocognitive processes, which translate into higher brain activations related to memory encoding and retrieval, ultimately correlating to higher recall. These findings advise the design of static and hedonic banners to improve the ad recall.Junta de Andalusia through FEDER B-SEJ-220-UGR18Fundacion Ramon Areces CISP18A6208Plan of the Vice-rectorate of Research of the UGR 82 Universidad de Granada/CBUA A-SEJ-426-UGR2

Neural Predictors of Changes in Party Closeness after Exposure to Corruption Messages: An fMRI Study

Daily worldwide newspapers are filled with campaigning unveiling political corruption. Despite this information be worrying to many citizens, political researchers have not identified any consistent trend of decline of support among party sympathizers. This study utilizes neuroimaging for the first time to examine the neuropsychological origin of party closeness variation among backers of a liberal (Spanish SocialistWorkers’ Party, PSOE) and a conservative party (Popular Party, PP) in Spain after a month receiving corruption messages among their preferred party. Brain data provide some explanation as to the origin of party closeness reduction among liberal sympathizers: areas involved with negative feelings, disappointment and self-relevance served to predict party closeness reduction 30 days in advance. Implications for liberals and conservatives’ campaigns are discussed.Fundacion Ramon Areces RARECES19-01Junta de Andalucía B-SEJ-220-UGR1

Teachers’ digital competencies in higher education: a systematic literature review

This article received support from the Teaching Innovation Project PIBD Basic II of the UGR (Grant No. 21-71): FlippedClassroom and Work-integrated Learning as Active Methodologies for Teaching Marketing in English and from the Innovation Project for The Improvement of Pre-service Teacher Training in Online Contexts (#BetterTeachers) (Grant No. ID-UDIMA-2020-02).Digital competence has gained a strong prominence in the educational context, being one of the key competencies that teachers must master in today’s society. Although most models and frameworks focus on the pre-university level, there is a growing interest in knowing the state of digital competencies of university teachers, that is, the set of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for a teacher to make effective use of technologies. The aim of this research is to present a systematic review of the literature in the Web of Science and Scopus, to identify, analyze and classify the published articles between 2000 and 2021 on digital competences, and thus find and improve the research being done on digital skills and future avenues of teachers in the university context. The SciMAT software is used in the analysis. The initial search reveals more than 343 articles in English, of which 152 are duplicates and 135 are not related to the topic of study. After this filtering, 56 articles are obtained and analyzed in depth. The results reveal a predominance of research that focuses on analyzing teachers’ self-assessment and reflection of their digital competencies. Teachers recognize that they have a low or medium–low digital competence, as well as the absence of certain competencies, especially those related to the evaluation of educational practice. Despite the multiple studies that address this issue, it is necessary to continue improving research in this area, deepening the assessment of teachers’ digital competencies and design, on this basis, more practical and personalized training programs that respond to the needs of teachers in the digital era.Teaching Innovation Project PIBD Basic II of the UGR 21-71Innovation Project for The Improvement of Pre-service Teacher Training in Online Contexts (#BetterTeachers) ID-UDIMA-2020-0

Sistema de seguridad basado en el cálculo de las trayectorias de los vehículos mediante cámara embarcada

En el presente proyecto se explica el desarrollo de una aplicación informática que realiza el procesado de una secuencia de imágenes captadas por una cámara estéreo embarcada en un turismo. Este software permite detectar vehículos que circulen en el mismo sentido que el turismo, determina a qué distancia se encuentran y su velocidad de circulación; asimismo efectúa una búsqueda de los vehículos detectados en imágenes previas para proceder a su seguimiento.Ingeniería Industria

Consumer Processing of Online Trust Signals: A Neuroimaging Study

The growth of online transactions coupled with the worldwide expansion of Internet-based information exchange has triggered fear, distrust and risk among online consumers. Despite the well-proven benefits to retailers when they include assurance services (online trust signals) such as seals of approval, rating systems or assurance statements in their websites, there is no consensus as the most trustworthy type. To fill this research gap, the current study reverts to neuroscience (fMRI) to compare the underlying brain mechanisms linked to each type. Twenty-nine subjects participated in an experiment simulating a low-involvement online purchase. The functional neuroimaging analysis reveals that seals of approval are the most trustworthy as they elicit activation of brain areas linked to reward and expected values. Although assurance statements reveal lower scores of trust than seals of approval, they do not arouse negative brain areas. By contrast, products accompanied by rating systems elicit brain areas linked to ambiguity, negativity and risk. Interestingly, more positive trust and purchase intentions toward seals of approval were predicted by the activation of value-computation areas, whereas higher scores of risk associated with rating systems were predicted by negative-related activations. These results offer invaluable insight into the psychological origin of trust conveyed to different types of online trust signals.2018-1

Toward a Fault-Tolerant Star Tracker for Small Satellite Applications

Star trackers are autonomous, high-accuracy electronic systems used to determine the attitude of a spacecraft. In recent years, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based star trackers are growing in importance for low-cost and short-duration missions, but their fault tolerance against soft errors has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we propose a self-healing system protected with ad hoc techniques that can be used as the first step to implement a fault-tolerant COTS-based star tracker for smallsat applications.The authors would like to thank E. Palombo from ESA/ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, for providing the star tracker images used in this paper

Coping with temperature extremes: thermal tolerance and behavioral plasticity in desert leaf-cutting ants (Hymeno ptera: Formicidae) across an altitudinal gradient

Current approaches to assess and predict the impact of climate warming on ectotherms are largely based on their physiological sensitivity to temperature. However, these physiological studies provide little insight into the mechanisms by which particular species respond to increasing temperatures through behavior, phenotypic plasticity, or genetic adaptation. In this work, we focus on the potential of thermoregulatory behaviors of terrestrial ectotherms to buffer the impact of climate change. Using as models two sympatric species of leaf-cutting ants (Acromyrmex lobicornis and A. striatus), we attempt to investigate whether their altitudinal distribution across an arid-base mountain is predicted by their physiological critic thermal limits (CTmax and CTmin), temperature of foraging activity, and fungus garden depth. We found that both species differed in their critical thermal limits, but this difference did not explain their pattern of abundance along the altitudinal gradient. Both species showed plasticity in their behavioral responses to temperature changes across the elevational gradient. The onset and daily pattern of foraging activity changed with altitude, such that the range of temperatures at which both species foraged as well as the temperature of maximum foraging activity were maintained across all elevations. The depth of the fungus chamber changed as a function of the environmental temperature, being deeper during the summer compared with the winter, and at the base of the mountain compared with the highest elevation. Our results show that we need to go beyond thermal physiology to predict how some ectotherms species respond to climate change and that the plasticity in behavioral responses to extreme temperature could allow species to persist in warmer habitats despite increasing temperatures.Fil: Yela, Natalia Ines. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Universidad Nacional de La Rioja. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Secretaría de Industria y Minería. Servicio Geológico Minero Argentino. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Provincia de La Rioja. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja; ArgentinaFil: Calcaterra, Luis Alberto. Fundación para el Estudio de Especies Invasivas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Aranda Rickert, Adriana Marina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Universidad Nacional de La Rioja. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Secretaría de Industria y Minería. Servicio Geológico Minero Argentino. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja. - Provincia de La Rioja. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica de La Rioja; Argentin

It is all about our impulsiveness – How consumer impulsiveness modulates neural evaluation of hedonic and utilitarian banners

This study was supported by two Excellence Projects awarded by the Junta de Andalusia [REF: B-SEJ-220-UGR18 and A-SEJ-426-UGR20], a grant from the Fundacion Ramon Areces [CISP18A6208] and a grant from the Plan of the Vice-rectorate of Research of the UGR (Program 20, application 82). We thank Universidad de Granada/CBUA for funding to make this paper open access.The increasing number of active Internet users has encouraged companies to compete to design the most efficient online ads for their target audience. While some companies build their ads based on the functional and instrumental benefits of their advertised products (i.e., utilitarian banners), others emphasize the experiential, personal, and emotional advantages of purchasing their product (i.e., hedonic banners). This is the first study to use neuroimaging to address the debate in the literature regarding the processing and effectiveness of these types of messages. By means of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we explored the neural mechanisms by which an individual consumer trait, namely consumer impulsiveness, influences the evaluation of hedonic and utilitarian banners. The neural results revealed that more impulsive consumers exhibit a higher level of activation in brain regions linked to reward, trust, emotion, as well as a reduction of activity in self-control brain networks, when viewing hedonic banners. Consumers reporting lower levels of impulsiveness (i.e., prudent users), in turn, exhibited stronger activation in brain regions associated with self-control and cognition when evaluating utilitarian banners. Consequently, on the basis of an objective and neuropsychological approach, these results can be used to inform companies about the type of online advertising they should use based on the characteristics of their target audience.Junta de Andalusia B-SEJ-220-UGR18 A-SEJ-426-UGR20Fundacion Ramon Areces CISP18A6208UGRUniversidad de Granada/CBU