Prefrontal acetylcholine release controls cue detection on multiple timescales.

Zoos, aquariums, and wildlife parks are vital centers of animal conservation and management. For nearly fifteen years, these institutions have relied on "Wild Mammals in Captivity" as the essential reference for their work. Now the book reemerges in a completely updated second edition. "Wild Mammals in Captivity" presents the most current thinking and practice in the care and management of wild mammals in zoos and other institutions. In one comprehensive volume, the editors have gathered the most current information from studies of animal behavior; advances in captive breeding; research in physiology, genetics, and nutrition; and new thinking in animal management and welfare. In this edition, more than three-quarters of the text is new, and information from more than seventy-five contributors is thoroughly updated. The standard text for all courses in zoo biology, "Wild Mammals in Captivity" will, in its new incarnation, continue to be used by zoo managers, animal caretakers, researchers, and anyone with an interest in how to manage animals in captive conditions.

Wild Mammals in Captivity: Principles and Techniques for Zoo Management, Second Edition

In affective computing applications, access to labeled spontaneous affective data is essential for testing the designed algorithms under naturalistic and challenging conditions. Most databases available today are acted or do not contain audio data. We present a spontaneous audio-visual affective face database of affective and mental states. The video clips in the database are obtained by recording the subjects from the frontal view using a stereo camera and from the half-profile view using a mono camera. The subjects are first shown a sequence of images and short video clips, which are not only meticulously fashioned but also timed to evoke a set of emotions and mental states. Then, they express their ideas and feelings about the images and video clips they have watched in an unscripted and unguided way in Turkish. The target emotions, include the six basic ones (happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise) as well as boredom and contempt. We also target several mental states, which are unsure (including confused, undecided), thinking, concentrating, and bothered. Baseline experimental results on the BAUM-1 database show that recognition of affective and mental states under naturalistic conditions is quite challenging. The database is expected to enable further research on audio-visual affect and mental state recognition under close-to-real scenarios.

BAUM-1: A Spontaneous Audio-Visual Face Database of Affective and Mental States

https://www.archives-pmr.org/article/S0003-9993(03)01179-1/pdf

The κ statistic in rehabilitation research: An examination

To support students’ academic, behavioral, and social needs, many schools have adopted multitiered models of prevention. Because Tier 3 interventions are costly in terms of time and resources, scho...

A Review of Tier 2 Interventions Conducted within Multitiered Models of Behavioral Prevention.

Behavioral researchers have developed a sophisticated methodology to evaluate behavioral change which is dependent upon accurate measurement of behavior. Direct observation of behavior has traditionally been the mainstay of behavioral measurement. Consequently, researchers must attend to the psychometric properties, such as interobserver agreement, of observational measures to ensure reliable and valid measurement. Of the many indices of interobserver agreement, percentage of agreement is the most popular. Its use persists despite repeated admonitions and empirical evidence indicating that it is not the most psychometrically sound statistic to determine interobserver agreement due to its inability to take chance into account. Cohen's (1960) kappa has long been proposed as the more psychometrically sound statistic for assessing interobserver agreement. Kappa is described and computational methods are presented.

http://edpsychassociates.com/Papers/Kappa(JBE2000).pdf

Miriam Pacheco

Papers

Interobserver Agreement in Behavioral Research: Importance and Calculation