Assessing Open Science practices in physical activity behaviour change intervention evaluations.

Objectives: Concerns on the lack of reproducibility and transparency in science have led to a range of research practice reforms, broadly referred to as 'Open Science'. The extent that physical activity interventions are embedding Open Science practices is currently unknown. In this study, we randomly sampled 100 reports of recent physical activity randomised controlled trial behaviour change interventions to estimate the prevalence of Open Science practices.

Knowledge Extraction and Prediction from Behavior Science Randomized Controlled Trials: A Case Study in Smoking Cessation.

Due to the fast pace at which randomized controlled trials are published in the health domain, researchers, consultants and policymakers would benefit from more automatic ways to process them by both extracting relevant information and automating the meta-analysis processes. In this paper, we present a novel methodology based on natural language processing and reasoning models to 1) extract relevant information from RCTs and 2) predict potential outcome values on novel scenarios, given the extracted knowledge, in the domain of behavior change for smoking cessation.

Delivering Behaviour Change Interventions: Development of a Mode of Delivery Ontology.

Investigating and improving the effects of behaviour change interventions requires detailed and consistent specification of all aspects of interventions. An important feature of interventions is the way in which these are delivered, i.e.

Representation of behaviour change interventions and their evaluation: Development of the Upper Level of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology.

Behaviour change interventions (BCI), their contexts and evaluation methods are heterogeneous, making it difficult to synthesise evidence and make recommendations for real-world policy and practice. Ontologies provide a means for addressing this. They represent knowledge formally as entities and relationships using a common language able to cross disciplinary boundaries and topic domains.

Ontologies relevant to behaviour change interventions: a method for their development.

Behaviour and behaviour change are integral to many aspects of wellbeing and sustainability. However, reporting behaviour change interventions accurately and synthesising evidence about effective interventions is hindered by lacking a shared, scientific terminology to describe intervention characteristics. Ontologies are standardised frameworks that provide controlled vocabularies to help unify and connect scientific fields.

Development of an Intervention Setting Ontology for behaviour change: Specifying where interventions take place.

: Contextual factors such as an intervention's setting are key to understanding how interventions to change behaviour have their effects and patterns of generalisation across contexts. The intervention's setting is not consistently reported in published reports of evaluations. Using ontologies to specify and classify intervention setting characteristics enables clear and reproducible reporting, thus aiding replication, implementation and evidence synthesis.

A scoping review of ontologies related to human behaviour change.

Ontologies are classification systems specifying entities, definitions and inter-relationships for a given domain, with the potential to advance knowledge about human behaviour change. A scoping review was conducted to: (1) identify what ontologies exist related to human behaviour change, (2) describe the methods used to develop these ontologies and (3) assess the quality of identified ontologies. Using a systematic search, 2,303 papers were identified.

Unsupervised Information Extraction from Behaviour Change Literature.

This paper describes our approach to construct a scalable system for unsupervised information extraction from the behaviour change intervention literature. Due to the many different types of attribute to be extracted, we adopt a passage retrieval based framework that provides the most likely value for an attribute. Our proposed method is capable of addressing variable length passage sizes and different validation criteria for the extracted values corresponding to each attribute to be found.

The Human Behaviour-Change Project: harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning for evidence synthesis and interpretation.

Background: Behaviour change is key to addressing both the challenges facing human health and wellbeing and to promoting the uptake of research findings in health policy and practice. We need to make better use of the vast amount of accumulating evidence from behaviour change intervention (BCI) evaluations and promote the uptake of that evidence into a wide range of contexts. The scale and complexity of the task of synthesising and interpreting this evidence, and increasing evidence timeliness and accessibility, will require increased computer support.

Investigating the association between social interactions and personality states dynamics.

The recent personality psychology literature has coined the name of to refer to states having the same behavioural, affective and cognitive content (described by adjectives) as the corresponding trait, but for a shorter duration. The variability in personality states may be the reaction to specific characteristics of situations. The aim of our study is to investigate whether specific situational factors, that is, different configurations of face-to-face interactions, are predictors of variability of personality states in a work environment.

Specificity of Age-Related Differences in Eye-Gaze Following: Evidence From Social and Nonsocial Stimuli.

Background: Eye-gaze following is a fundamental social skill, facilitating communication. The present series of studies explored adult age-related differences in this key social-cognitive ability.

Method: In Study 1 younger and older adult participants completed a cueing task in which eye-gaze cues were predictive or non-predictive of target location.

Age-related differences in processing face configuration: the importance of the eye region.

Objectives: Recent research suggests that older adults have difficulties with aspects of configural face processing. The present study examined whether age-related declines in sensitivity to configural face information are dependent on the face region in which configural changes occur.

Method: Younger and older adults completed a face-matching task that required the detection of configural manipulations to either the eye or the mouth regions of target faces.