| 1. |
- Alakukku, Laura, et al.
(författare)
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Maatalouden ympäristötuen vaikuttavuuden seurantatutkimus (MYTVAS 3) : loppuraportti
- 2014
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since 1995, agri-environmental support partly funded by the EU has formed the core of Finland’s agri-environmental policy. This system has had a variety of impacts on the relationship between agriculture and the environment. Today’s agri-environmental support is one of the packages included in the Rural Development Programme for Mainland Finland (2007–2013/2014), which both in itself and through the underlying EU legislation requires monitoring of the impacts of the measures implemented. The study monitoring the impact of the 2nd Finnish agri-environmental scheme (MYTVAS 3), which ran from 2008 to 2013, forms part of this monitoring. The MYTVAS 3 monitoring study was also financed by the Ministry of the Environment. The monitoring study was carried out by a consortium coordinated by MTT Agrifood Research Finland and including the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute and the University of Turku.The purpose of the MYTVAS 3 monitoring study was to find out how agri-environmental support and its various measures have affected the state of the environment in agricultural areas, how agri-environmental support has affected the potential for farming and how agri-environmental support should be developed to increase its impact. The monitoring focused on the impacts of agri-environmental support on the nutrient load from agriculture on the waterways and on biodiversity. When evaluating the findings presented, we should remember that while monitoring data shows that something happened, it does not necessarily explain what caused it. It is not always possible to show that particular developments were a specific outcome of the current agri-environmental support system and the implementation of its measures. The delay between a measure and its observed impact is often long, and the cause-and-effect relationships are complicated and partly unknown. Also, other agricultural policy and fluctuations on the market may affect the state of the agricultural environment directly or indirectly.The monitoring data show that agri-environmental support has not had a detrimental impact on the potential for farming. Despite a slight increase in the incidence of weeds, they do not cause problems of the kind that would require amendments to the content of agri-environmental measures. Carbon levels in the surface stratum of arable land seems to be continuing their slow decline, and there is still need for measures to preserve organic material in the soil.Compliance with the fertilisation limits in the agri-environmental support system would seem to have had very little impact on crop quality. Variations in the weight and protein content per hectolitre and per 1,000 seeds were of the same order between 2006 and 2012 as they were between 1995 and 2005. Crop quantities have also not been noticeably affected by compliance with the fertilisation limits. Average crop yields remained stable between 1986 and 2013, and no clearly different crop years were observed in the 2000s. It is possible, however, that the lower fertilisation levels could have lowered crop potential in the years with advantageous weather conditions in the 2000s and that protein contents have been lower in advantageous years.The monitoring data also show that the nutrient load potential of agriculture, measured by nutrient balances, has decreased continuously for nitrogen and particularly for phosphorus. The decrease in the nutrient load potential is due above all to a decrease in the use of synthetic fertilisers. The decline in nitrogen fertilisation has bottomed out in recent years, and low protein levels measured in high crop yield years show that there is no point in further reducing nitrogen fertilisation. Optimising nitrogen fertilisation according to how advantageous the growing season is and effectively using the soluble nitrogen in cattle manure are key measures in achieving reasonable nitrogen balances and good crop quality despite fluctuations in growing season conditions. New crop variants have been found to make more efficient use of nitrogen than old ones, and thus the introduction of new variants should be promoted. Despite the decrease in the nutrient balances, there are indications that nutrient loads in runoff water from domestic animal production sites are becoming an increasing problem. Indeed, the fundamental problem with the nutrient load from agriculture is the diversification of livestock farming and crop farming, which has made it more difficult to use nutrients appropriately. Therefore attention must be paid to measures that both boost the use of nutrients in manure and reduce the levels of nutrients that end up in manure. Based on nutrient load monitoring in the catchment areas of rivers, the phosphorus load per hectare of cropland has decreased in each programme period, being about 80% of the level of the first period (1995–1999) in the third period (2007–2013). Because of the increase in the area of cropland, the nitrogen load on waterways from agriculture continued to grow during the second programme period (2000–2006) but peaked in the third (2007–2013). A similar trend was found in the nitrogen load per hectare of cropland.The most important threat to biodiversity is caused by the development of landscape structure, typically involving a decrease in the number of open or half-open areas excluded from actual cultivation. The consequence of the clearing of margins and ecological islands located in crop fields, drainage measures aimed at increasing arable land and all rationalisation of cultivated areas is the diminishing of exactly those areas that are the most important from the perspective of the biodiversity of the agricultural environment. However, the measure-specific findings in the monitoring study show that biodiversity benefits have been locally achieved where measures have been implemented on a broad enough scale (biodynamic farming, traditional biotopes, wetlands, buffer zones, green fallow / nature management areas). Particular care should therefore be taken that all cultivated land continues to have a sufficient percentage of non-cultivated areas, whether they be natural meadows, nature management areas, biodiversity strips, buffer zones, filter strips, headlands, ecological islands, etc. Including the rather popular nature management areas as a new voluntary measure under basic measures was a significant contribution to biodiversity.Regarding the rural landscape, it may be noted that by visual inspection the area of cropland has remained largely unchanged, at the level of the landscape as a whole it is far more common for the landscape to become more closed than to become more open. This trend was also observed in the visual inspection of traditional biotopes, even if the openness of the meadows monitored largely remained unchanged.The only measures that directly address the reduction of gaseous emissions in the agri-environmental support system are the longterm grass cultivation on peat fields and special aid agreements for slurry injection in cropland. While other measures have indirectly affected gaseous emissions, the impact of agri-environmental support as a whole on reducing gaseous emissions from agriculture has been negligible. In general, we may conclude that the goals, content and support levels of agri-environmental support measures must be increasingly adapted and customised by region, by type of farming and by farm, because both the state of the agricultural environment and the needs of society differ greatly between different types of rural area.
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| 2. |
- Forssman, Linda, et al.
(författare)
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Assessing the Feasibility of Using Eye Tracking to Study Infants’ Cognitive Functioning in Rural Malawi
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- BackgroundChildren growing up in low-income countries are at an increased risk for exposure to adverse contextual factors that may affect their cognitive development early in life. Yet, the prevalence and specific nature of cognitive problems are still poorly understood given a lack of objective, non-invasive, and field-friendly techniques for assessing early cognitive functioning in low-resource settings. In an effort to help address this gap, we carried out a study to evaluate the feasibility of using eye tracking to assess infants’ cognitive functioning in a low-income setting.MethodsA battery of eye tracking tests were used to assess basic cognitive functions, such as anticipatory looking, sequence learning, and perception of facial expressions, of 39 Finnish and 37 Malawian infants 9 months of age. To evaluate the feasibility of using the eye tracking method in Malawi, we measured and compared the acceptability of the eye tracking method (the participants’ mothers’ appreciation of the method) and quality of the eye tracking data collected from the Malawian site to that of data collected from the Finnish site. The following conditions needed to be met in order for the method to be defined as feasible: (1) a proportion of Malawian participants similar to that of Finnish participants had to be able to complete the whole assessment, (2) a proportion of participating Malawian mothers similar to that of Finnish mothers had to report acceptance of the method, and (3) the eye tracking data quality in terms of attrition rate and proportion of valid trials had to be similar at the two sites (Malawi and Finland) and in parity with previous infancy eye tracking studies (i.e., attrition rate around 20–35% or lower, based on Ambrosini et al. 2013, Oakes and Ellis 2013, and Watanabe et al. 2012, and proportion of valid trials in each eye tracking task at greater than 70%, based on Forssman, Wass, and Leppänen 2014 and Leppänen et al. 2014).ResultsThe majority of Finnish (95%) and Malawian (92%) infants were able to complete the whole assessment. At both sites, 95% or more of the participating mothers reported acceptability of the method. Examination of eye tracking data quality between the Finnish and Malawian testing sites showed similar patterns, although the overall completion rate (Finland: 94.9%; Malawi: 91.9%) and the overall proportion of valid trials (Finland: 79.5%; Malawi: 71%) were slightly in favor of the Finnish sample. There were however no significant differences in task-specific data attrition rates between the two samples (p = .141–.946) and the attrition rates at both sites was equivalent to or better than the attrition rates reported in previous eye tracking studies with infants of similar age.ConclusionsThe consistency of data retention and test acceptance rate between the Finnish and Malawian samples demonstrates the feasibility of eye tracking-based assessments of infants’ cognition in low-resource settings. Based on the results from this pilot test, we believe that eye tracking is a promising tool for assessing early cognitive functions in Malawi and other low-income countries. However, further research is still needed to establish the validity of early-emerging cognitive markers as predictors of long-term health outcomes in childhood.
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| 5. |
- Forssman, Linda, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Eye-tracking-based assessment of cognitive function in low-resource settings
- 2017
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Ingår i: Archives of Disease in Childhood. - : BMJ. - 0003-9888 .- 1468-2044. ; 102:4, s. 301-302
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Early development of neurocognitive functions in infants can be compromised by poverty, malnutrition and lack of adequate stimulation. Optimal management of neurodevelopmental problems in infants requires assessment tools that can be used early in life, and are objective and applicable across economic, cultural and educational settings.Objective and design: The present study examined the feasibility of infrared eye tracking as a novel and highly automated technique for assessing visual-orienting and sequence-learning abilities as well as attention to facial expressions in young (9-month-old) infants. Techniques piloted in a high-resource laboratory setting in Finland (N=39) were subsequently field-tested in a community health centre in rural Malawi (N=40).Results: Parents' perception of the acceptability of the method (Finland 95%, Malawi 92%) and percentages of infants completing the whole eye-tracking test (Finland 95%, Malawi 90%) were high, and percentages of valid test trials (Finland 69-85%, Malawi 68-73%) satisfactory at both sites. Test completion rates were slightly higher for eye tracking (90%) than traditional observational tests (87%) in Malawi. The predicted response pattern indicative of specific cognitive function was replicated in Malawi, but Malawian infants exhibited lower response rates and slower processing speed across tasks.Conclusions: High test completion rates and the replication of the predicted test patterns in a novel environment in Malawi support the feasibility of eye tracking as a technique for assessing infant development in low-resource setting. Further research is needed to the test-retest stability and predictive validity of the eye-tracking scores in low-income settings.
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| 6. |
- Forssman, Linda, et al.
(författare)
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Regulatory variant of the TPH2 gene and early life stress are associated with heightened attention to social signals of fear in infants
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. - : Wiley. - 0021-9630 .- 1469-7610. ; 55:7, s. 793-801
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BACKGROUND: Cross-species evidence suggests that genetic and experiential factors act early in development to establish individual emotional traits, but little is known about the mechanisms that emerge during this period to mediate long-term outcomes. Here, we tested the hypothesis that known genetic and environmental risk conditions may heighten infants' natural tendency to attend to threat-alerting stimuli, resulting in a cognitive bias that may contribute to emotional vulnerability.METHODS: Data from two samples of 5-7-month-old infants (N = 139) were used to examine whether established candidate variations in the serotonin-system genes, i.e., TPH2 SNP rs4570625 (-703 G/T) and HTR1A SNP rs6295 (-1019 G/C), and early rearing condition (maternal stress and depressive symptoms) are associated with alterations in infants' attention to facial expressions. Infants were tested with a paradigm that assesses the ability to disengage attention from a centrally presented stimulus (a nonface control stimulus or a neutral, happy, or fearful facial expression) toward the location of a new stimulus in the visual periphery (a geometric shape).RESULTS: TPH2 -703 T-carrier genotype (i.e., TT homozygotes and heterozygotes), presence of maternal stress and depressive symptoms, and a combination of the T-carrier genotype and maternal depressive symptoms were associated with a relatively greater difficulty disengaging attention from fearful facial expressions. No associations were found with infants' temperamental traits.CONCLUSIONS: Alterations in infants' natural attentional bias toward fearful facial expressions may emerge prior to the manifestation of emotional and social behaviors and provide a sensitive marker of early emotional development.
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| 10. |
- Holmqvist, Kenneth, et al.
(författare)
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Eye tracking : empirical foundations for a minimal reporting guideline
- 2023
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Ingår i: Behavior Research Methods. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1554-3528. ; 55:1, s. 364-416
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, we present a review of how the various aspects of any study using an eye tracker (such as the instrument, methodology, environment, participant, etc.) affect the quality of the recorded eye-tracking data and the obtained eye-movement and gaze measures. We take this review to represent the empirical foundation for reporting guidelines of any study involving an eye tracker. We compare this empirical foundation to five existing reporting guidelines and to a database of 207 published eye-tracking studies. We find that reporting guidelines vary substantially and do not match with actual reporting practices. We end by deriving a minimal, flexible reporting guideline based on empirical research (Section "An empirically based minimal reporting guideline").
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