Gage Grutz presents at BVU’s 14th annual Scholars Day

STORM LAKE — Buena Vista University’s 14th annual Scholars Day was held April 28.

The event provided students from all disciplines an opportunity to present their best original research, academic posters, artistic creations, and performances to their peers, professors, and the public.

This year’s Scholars Day event featured presentations from more than BVU 35 students, exploring topics from literature and business to science and history.

Gage Grutz, a senior psychology major from Kellogg, was one of the students who participated. Grutz’s presentation was titled “University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Experience: Sociality in Pinyon Jays and Graduate School Preparation” and the project’s abstract is as follows:

“After emailing more than 20 professors from universities around the Midwest, I was able to secure a research assistant internship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working for the Adaptive Decision Making Lab, directed by Dr. Jeffery Stevens. Past research conducted by a graduate student of Dr. Stevens, Juan Duque, found that pinyon jays, a highly social North American corvid, act prosocially but not altruistically in a food sharing task (Duque, Leichner, Ahmann & Stevens, in press). Additionally, Juan had various behavioral, cognitive and physiological measures from separate experiments to examine if specific individual differences correlate with altruistic behavior. I was given the opportunity to conduct another experiment measuring sociality because altruistic behavior in pinyon jays was not demonstrated. The data from the sociality experiment will be used to investigate any behavioral, cognitive, or physiological differences that may exist between social and non-social pinyon jays. Before arriving to UNL, I set the following learning objectives/goals for myself: gain a better sense of what graduate level research will be like through a hands-on experience, gain a better sense of what type of graduate program I want to pursue, and make personal connections with faculty and current graduate students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.”