The preference assessment literature has mainly focused on children and adults with developmental disabilities. To date, minimal research related to preference and reinforcer assessments has been conducted with the elderly population with cognitive impairment. This study assessed the predictive validity of engagement- and selection-based preference assessment formats with two types of reinforcer assessments. One of these reinforcer assessments was engagement-based, and the other one included a task. The participants were three elderly individuals at an adult day program with a formal diagnosis of Dementia and a score less than 24 on the MMSE. The first participant's top items in the each preference assessment were validated in both reinforcer assessments. The second participant's top items from the free operant and MSWO were validated with the engagement-based reinforcer assessment, but the other assessment produced variable responding. The third participant's top items were validated in three out of four reinforcer assessments. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for preference and reinforcer assessments and their utility with the population of elderly adults with cognitive impairments.

Few researchers have compared preference for reinforcement and response cost within a token economy, and the results have shown that preference varies among individuals (e.g., Donaldson et al., 2014; Iwata & Bailey, 1974; Jowett Hirst et al., 2016). Preference for response cost is an interesting phenomenon because response cost is a punishment procedure and is often considered aversive. Therefore, identifying the variables that influence preference for response cost is an important area of research. Some authors have suggested that the immediate delivery or presence of tokens might influence preference for response cost, but these variables have yet to be experimentally evaluated. The current study evaluated whether the presence of tokens influences selection of response cost over reinforcement in three typically developing preschool children by systematically varying the presence of tokens across both the reinforcement and response cost procedures. Results suggest that the presence of tokens influenced selection for one out of three participants. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of clinical application and directions for future research.

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Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Timothy D. Keane / According to the National Alliance on Mental illness, 18.5% of adults in the U.S. experience mental illness each year. Many recent studies suggest that the natural environment can beneficially impact the mental health of an individual. Research on healing gardens suggests that if an individual with depression has a higher aesthetic preference for a landscape, the individual will see a positive increase in mood and perhaps a decrease in depressive symptoms. An environmental preference study was conducted to understand if an aesthetically preferred landscape has an impact on the mood of an individual. Participants were recruited from two universities and included students and non-students. A total of 120 participants were given the option of online or in-person participation. Prior to viewing landscape images, participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Environmental Preference Questionnaire (EPQ). Before and after viewing each image, the participants indicated their mood using a Visual Analog Scale and their aesthetic preference using a Likert-type Scale. This study showed a positive increase in mood, dependent upon aesthetic preference across all participants, however, an overall lower mood for individuals with higher depressional tendencies.

The present research examines how hedonic and utilitarian purchase motivations influence consumers’ perceptions of their product preferences and the resulting number of options they wish to consider when making a purchase. Experimental study results show that consumers choose to review larger assortments when their purchase motivation is hedonic rather than when their purchase motivation is utilitarian. This effect occurs because consumers with hedonic purchase motivations perceive their product preferences as highly unique compared to consumers with utilitarian purchase motivations. Higher perceived preference uniqueness increases the difficulty consumers anticipate in finding a preference-matching product, resulting in an expansion of the number of product alternatives to review. Further supporting the perceived preference uniqueness account, the documented effect is attenuated when a social similarity priming task is employed and when product assortments are customized based on consumers’ personal preferences. Additional alternative explanations are explored. These findings provide additional evidence on the distinction between hedonic and utilitarian purchase motivations, their impact on perceived preference uniqueness, and their implications for consumer decision making via assortment size choice.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the profile preferences of laypeople in (USA, Switzerland, Lebanon, South Africa, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey), and to assess if gender, age, race, education and income had influence on decision. METHODS: 535 laypersons rated fifty profile silhouettes of profile after altering the lip in five 1 mm increments in the sagittal direction and nose in three sagittal and vertical directions, creating 45 combinations. Demographics were collected. The soft tissue values were incorporated. ANOVA with post hocTukey test were used to compare difference in means in each location. Multivariate regression model was used to assess the effect of demographics on preference. RESULTS: The mean preference was significantly different across locations at p-value of <.0001. In the United States and Lebanon, the most preferred profile was original lip and nose, in Switzerland and South Africa, was L-2, N A -1, V -1, in Japan and Saudi Arabia, was L0, N A +1, V-1, and in Turkey, was L+2, N A -1, V+1. Profile change, location, gender and race were significant confounders at p-value of <.0001, <.0001, <.0001 and 0.02 respectively, on the other hand, age, education and income were not. CONCLUSION: Layperson’s perception of lip and nose position is different among the seven locations. Layperson prefer profiles within one standard deviation from the norms for Caucasians behind the E-line. Layperson is not reliable in their rating of lip changes within ∓2 mm. Gender and race are significant confounders unlike age, education and income.

Twelve pelicans captured in northeast Mississippi were used for a 7 day metabolism trial followed by a 2 day preference trial and a trial to evaluate the effect of consuming plastic tags. In the metabolism trial, pelicans were allotted to one of three treatment diets (4 birds/diet): catfish only, carp only or both (50 % catfish and 50% carp). Pelicans consuming the catfish only diet metabolized less dry matter, organic matter and energy than those consuming only carp or both. Four pelicans were used to determine preference for carp or catfish. Pelicans ate more (P = 0.001) carp (89 % of diet) and digested nutrients from carp more efficiently than they did from catfish. Plastic tags were attached to numerous fish fed to pelicans in the preference trial, which were regurgitated or retained by pelicans, with no effect on the plastic tags by digestion.

Durant la dernière décennie, l’évolution du Web a été marquée par une forte croissance des services publiés et qui s’est accompagnée d’une explosion considérable du nombre d’usagers dont les profils et contextes sont divers et variés. Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse traitent de l’optimisation de requêtes de services Web où le profil/contexte de l’utilisateur joue un rôle central. Il s’agit de sélectionner un service ou une combinaison de services pertinents parmi une masse importante de candidats compétitifs et capables de réaliser une tâche requise. Ces services candidats devant répondre au mieux aux exigences demandées par l’utilisateur selon un ensemble de critères non-fonctionnels. Dans notre approche, les critères non-fonctionnels considérés sont tous associés aux préférences du demandeur de service. Un intérêt plus important est alors porté à l’utilisateur qui se trouve au coeur du processus de sélection. La diversité du profil et du contexte de l’utilisateur, et également ceux des services cibles,rend ce processus encore plus complexe. Notre étude se focalise, dans un premier lieu,sur l’analyse des différentes approches de sélection de services Web existant dans la littérature. Nous mettons, notamment, en évidence leur contribution à la résolution des problèmes inhérents à la sélection des meilleurs services dans le but de satisfaire les critères non-fonctionnels formulés dans la requête. Dans un second temps, notre intérêt s’est porté sur la modélisation de spécification de l’offre et la demande de services,de leurs contextes et profils ainsi que les deux classes de préférences utilisateurs :explicites et implicites. Enfin, nous proposons une nouvelle famille d’approches d’optimisation qui intègre une stratégie de reformulation de requêtes par introduction des préférences implicites. Le concept clé de ces approches est un mécanisme d’inférence flou permettant d’accomplir un raisonnement déductif sur les informations liées au profil et contexte de l’utilisateur. Le principe consiste à combiner les deux familles de préférences utilisateur, tout en considérant conjointement les profils et les contextes des services et de l’utilisateur. L’application de la théorie des ensembles flous dans l’optimisation des requêtes à préférences des utilisateurs, en intégrant un module de raisonnement sur les informations liées à l’utilisateur, s’avère d’un intérêt majeur dans l’amélioration des qualités des résultats retournés. Nous présentons à la fin de l’étude une série d’expérimentations pour montrer la validité et la pertinence des approches proposées. / The internet has completely transformed the way how we communicate (access toinformation). Its evolution was marked by strong growth of published services which has been accompanied by a large explosion in the number of users and a diversity oftheir profiles and their contexts.The work presented in this thesis deal with the adaptive optimization of Web services queries to user needs. This problem is to select a service or a combination of relevant services from a collection of candidates able to perform a required task. These candidate services must meet the requirements requested by the user, the selection makes his/herchoice from non-functional criteria. In our approach, non-functional criteria considered are all associated with preferences of service requester. A significant interest is therefore carried to the user who is at the core of the selection system. This selection is generally considered a complex task because of the diversity of profile and context of the service,which it is performed.Our study focuses mainly on the analysis of different service selection approaches.We especially highlight their contribution to solving the problems inherent in selecting the best services in order to meet the non-functional parameters of the request. Second, our interest has focused on modeling the specification of supply and demand for services, their context and profile as well as the two families preferences : explicit and implicit. Finally, we propose a novel optimization approach that integrates a query reformulation strategy by introducing implicit preferences based on the fuzzy inference process. The idea is to combine the two families of preferences required by the user with consideration of profiles and contexts of services and the user simultaneously. The application of fuzzy set theory in the optimization of preference query of customers by integrating reasoning module on information related to the user leads of great interest in improving the quality of results. We present at the end a set of experiments to demonstrate the validity and relevance of the proposed approach.