Synchronization of Dairy Cows Does Not Limit the Behavioral Response to Treatment in Mixed Treatment Experimental Designs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many research studies, animals assigned to different treatments are housed adjacently or together in a group. One critique of these designs has been the potential role of behavioral facilitation and synchronization between animals on different treatments in mixed treatment groups (heterogeneous groups). To evaluate this, we compared the synchrony of feeding behavior between dairy cows housed in heterogeneous groups to cows exposed to the same treatment simultaneously (homogenous groups). Twenty-four cows were exposed to each of the two treatments over 21 days in a replicated cross-over design. Treatments were two different schedules of timing of feed delivery: (A) feeding at milking time and (B) feeding halfway between milking times. For the last 7 days of each treatment period, feeding behavior was recorded electronically. Kappa coefficients were calculated for each animal within each group, as an estimate of agreement that any two cows within a group (i.e., each individual and each other cow in her group) would both be engaged in feeding activity for any hour of the day. The level of synchrony was similar for cows within homogenous groups (kappa = 0.31 ± 0.030) compared with cows on the same treatment within heterogeneous groups (kappa = 0.32 ± 0.037). Within heterogeneous groups, cows on the same treatment were nearly 50% more synchronized with each other than with those on the other treatment (kappa = 0.22 ± 0.029). These results suggest that synchronization of feeding behavior does not restrict our ability to impose different treatments on individual cows within a group.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".