Trust Your Memory? Maybe You Shouldn't

You probably feel pretty attached to your memories -- they're yours, after all. They define who you are and where you came from, your accomplishments and failures, your likes and dislikes. Your memories help you separate friends from enemies. They remind you not to eat too much ice cream or drink cheap tequila because you remember how horrible it felt the last time you indulged. Or do you? One conversation with Elizabeth Loftus may shake your confidence in everything you think you remember. Loftus is a cognitive psychologist and expert on the malleability of human memory. She can, quite literally, change your mind. more

New Study Recommends Using "Exergaming" to Improve Children's Health

Emerging research shows that exergaming – using active console video games that track player movement to control the game (e.g., Xbox-Kinect, Wii) — can increase physical activity in kids. In the study, scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers from The University of Western Australia, and Swansea University evaluated 15 children, 9-11 years of age. Participants performed 15 minutes each of high intensity exergaming (Kinect Sports – 200m Hurdles), low intensity exergaming (Kinect Sports – Ten Pin Bowling), and a graded exercise test (treadmill). The researchers measured energy expenditure and an individual’s vascular response to each activity using flow-mediated dilation (FMD) — a validated measure of vascular function and health in children. They found that high intensity exergaming elicited an energy expenditure equivalent to moderate intensity exercise; low intensity exergaming resulted in an energy expenditure equivalent to low intensity exercise. more

Learning from Experiences: Brain Rewires Itself After Damage or Injury

When the brain's primary "learning center" is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating those alternate pathways -- often far from the damaged site. The research, conducted by UCLA's Michael Fanselow and Moriel Zelikowsky in collaboration with Bryce Vissel, a group leader of the neuroscience research program at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, appears this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....For the study, Fanselow and Zelikowsky conducted laboratory experiments with rats showing that the rodents were able to learn new tasks even after damage to the hippocampus. While the rats needed more training than they would have normally, they nonetheless learned from their experiences -- a surprising finding. more

How Individuality Develops: Experience Leads to Growth of New Brain Cells

The adult brain continues to grow with the challenges that it faces; its changes are linked to the development of personality and behavior. But what is the link between individual experience and brain structure? Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together? To shed light on these questions, the scientists observed forty genetically identical mice that were kept in an enclosure offering a large variety of activity and exploration options. "The animals were not only genetically identical, they were also living in the same environment," explains principal investigator Gerd Kempermann, Professor for Genomics of Regeneration, CRTD, and Site Speaker of the DZNE in Dresden. "However, this environment was so rich that each mouse gathered its own individual experiences in it. Over time, the animals therefore increasingly differed in their realm of experience and behavior." more

"Conscious" Computing: How to Take Control of Your Life Online

To explain what makes the web so compelling – so "addictive" in the colloquial sense, at least – the advocates of conscious computing usually end up returning to the psychologist BF Skinner, who conducted famous experiments on pigeons and rats at Harvard University in the 1930s. Trapped inside "Skinner boxes", equipped with a lever and a tray, the animals soon learned that pushing or pecking at the lever caused a pellet of food to appear on the tray; after that, they'd start compulsively pecking or pushing for more. But Skinner discovered that the most powerful way to reinforce the push-or-peck habit was to use "variable schedules of reward": to deliver a pellet not every time the lever was pushed, but only sometimes, and unpredictably. more

When Money Talks, People Walk

It was a controversial move when a health insurer began requiring people who were obese to literally pay the price of not doing anything about their weight – but it worked, a new study finds. When people had to choose between paying up to 20 percent more for health insurance or exercising more, the majority of enrollees met fitness goals one step at a time via an Internet-tracked walking program, according to a joint study by the University of Michigan Health System and Stanford University. Researchers evaluated a group of people insured by Blue Care Network who were enrolled in a pedometer-based program as a requirement to receive insurance discounts. After one year, nearly 97 percent of the enrollees had met or exceeded the average goal of 5,000 steps a day – including the most resistant participants who disagreed with the financial incentives and found the program "coercive." more

Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out of Touch With Science, Experts Say

Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific “lack of validity.” The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms...“As long as the research community takes the D.S.M. to be a bible, we’ll never make progress,” Dr. Insel said, adding, “People think that everything has to match D.S.M. criteria, but you know what? Biology never read that book.” more

Pediatric Specialists Not Following Clinical Guidelines When Treating Preschoolers With ADHD

A recent study by pediatricians from the Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York examined to what extent pediatric physicians adhere to American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) clinical guidelines regarding pharmacotherapy in treating young patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The results showed that more than 90 percent of medical specialists who diagnose and manage ADHD in preschoolers do not follow treatment guidelines recently published by the AAP... Current clinical guidelines for pediatricians and child psychiatrists associated with the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) recommend that behavior therapy be the initial treatment approach for preschoolers with ADHD, and that treatment with medication should only be pursued when counseling in behavior management is not successful. more

Moist Robots: Philosophy That Stirs the Waters

The new book, largely adapted from previous writings, is also a lively primer on the radical answers Mr. [Daniel] Dennett has elaborated to the big questions in his nearly five decades in philosophy, delivered to a popular audience in books like “Consciousness Explained” (1991), “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995) and “Freedom Evolves.” The mind? A collection of computerlike information processes, which happen to take place in carbon-based rather than silicon-based hardware. The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams. The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion. Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.” more

The Latest Issue of The Current Repertoire is Now Available

The latest issue of The Current Repertoire (Spring 2013) is now available online.  The Current Repertoire is the official newsletter of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. more

This issue includes:

• Science, Fads and ABA:  The Treatment of Communication Disorders: A Review of Soma® Rapid Prompt Method - Contributed by Dr. Thomas Zane
• Look for Helpers -Dr. Timothy Ludwig shares Mr. Rogers’ advice on looking for the helpers, reminding us to notice the helpers doing their small and large acts each and every day 
• Are Women Really the Fairer Sex? Gender and Ethics at Work - Dr. Darnell Lattal questions "Do women think and behave differently than men when making ethical decisions?" 
• Think Different! Align Your Observation Checklists and Safety Committees by Dr. Terry McSween
• 7 Things that Separate Weight-Loss Winners & Losers - Megan Coatley gives behavioral health advice

Disputed Results a Fresh Blow for Social Psychology

Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behavior can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack. A paper published in PLoS ONE last week reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks. David Shanks, a cognitive psychologist at University College London, UK, and first author of the paper in PLoS ONE, is among skeptical scientists calling for Dijksterhuis to design a detailed experimental protocol to be carried out indifferent laboratories to pin down the effect. Dijksterhuis has rejected the request, saying that he “stands by the general effect” and blames the failure to replicate on “poor experiments." more

Signs of Culture in Whales and Monkeys

The phrase “monkey see, monkey do” applies to humpback whales. Vervet monkeys and humpback whales both copy behaviors from their neighbors, researchers report April 25 in Science. The two studies suggest that, like humans, some wild animals pick up new habits from each other. Accurately imitating one another’s actions is a “potential building block of culture,” says cultural evolutionist Peter Richerson of the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the work. Complex culture builds upon people learning skills from each other, he says. more

Bad Science: The Mind of a Con Man

At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be. The adjective “sloppy” seems charitable. Several psychologists I spoke to admitted that each of these more common practices was as deliberate as any of Stapel’s wholesale fabrications. Each was a choice made by the scientist every time he or she came to a fork in the road of experimental research — one way pointing to the truth, however dull and unsatisfying, and the other beckoning the researcher toward a rosier and more notable result that could be patently false or only partly true. What may be most troubling about the research culture the committees describe in their report are the plentiful opportunities and incentives for fraud. more

Are Timeouts Messing Up Your Kids? Only If You're Doing Them Wrong. (And Yes, You Probably Are.)

Timeouts may sound cruel, but they make sense when you consider their history and context. The term timeout is actually an abbreviation for timeout from positive reinforcement. Timeouts are based on the premise that kids should be raised in environments that are rich with “time-ins:” loving, positive interactions like “reading a story, laughing with them, fixing popcorn with them, or playing a game with them,” says Edward Christophersen, a psychologist and pediatrician at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and the author of Beyond Discipline: Parenting That Lasts a Lifetime. When children in nurturing environments do something dangerous or defiant, the idea is to briefly take away positive reinforcement so that they learn to associate the good things—the time-ins—with good, safe behavior. Timeouts don’t work very well, then, if you haven’t created a richly positive environment for your child. more

Green Beans & Ice Cream: The Remarkable Power of Positive Reinforcement

This book with the fun title, Green Beans & Ice Cream, informs the reader about positive reinforcement. The title represents an early life experience of Bill Sims Jr. It’s an example of positive reinforcement used by his mother. If you eat something nasty, green beans, you’ll be rewarded with something fantastic, a bowl of ice cream. In this little experiment by his mother Sims found his life’s calling. more

Have We Evolved To Be Nasty Or Nice?

Most evolutionists now accept that kindness might be just as ancient and innate as selfishness. But it's also clearly conditional: People tend to cooperate with relatives and frequently encountered acquaintances, not indiscriminately. It is futile to ask whether people are naturally cooperative or selfish. They can be either, depending on the circumstances. Dr. Helbing cites "tragedies of the commons" where open access to a common-pool resource such as a fishery tends to result in overfishing that harms everybody—a sort of extended real-world version of the prisoner's dilemma. more

MyRewards! Positive Reinforcement On Your iPad

MyRewards! is a iPad app for parents who want to encourage their children to perform certain duties and activities. Using positive reinforcement, children are motivated to perform their tasks, what increases their self-confidence and good habits. My Rewards! allows parents to set goals, grant prizes and motivate the children to earn the prizes by achieving the goals. Experts in child behaviour agree on positive reinforcement for kids as one ot the most effective techniques for educating children. With MyRewards! children are motivated to to perform their tasks with positive reinforcement, to get a reward upon completion. more

Behavior Therapy for ADHD Children: More Carrot, Less Stick

Imagine a treatment that could manage the behavior of a child with attention deficit disorder (ADD), make you a better parent, and enlist teachers to help him do well in school — all without the side effects of ADHD medications. There is such a treatment. It’s called behavior therapy — a series of techniques to improve parenting skills and a child’s behavior...“A pill decreases common ADHD symptoms like impulsivity and distractibility, but it doesn’t change behavior. A child on medication might be disinclined to punch someone, because he’s less impulsive, but he doesn’t know what to do instead. Behavior therapy fills in the blanks, by giving a child positive alternative behaviors to use.” more

The Power of Talking to Your Baby

By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth...[T]he key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better...The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea...The Providence Talks program will be based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published a book, “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” more

The Normal Well-Tempered Mind: Daniel Dennett and Cultural Fleas

Basically, the model that we have and have used for several thousand years is the model that culture consists of treasures, cultural treasures. Just like money, or like tools and houses, you bequeath them to your children, and you amass them, and you protect them, and because they're valuable, you maintain them and prepare them, and then you hand them on to the next generation and some societies are rich, and some societies are poor, but it's all goods. I think that vision is true of only the tip of the iceberg.  Most of the regularities in culture are not treasures. It's not all opera and science and fortifications and buildings and ships. It includes all kinds of bad habits and ugly patterns and stupid things that don't really matter but that somehow have got a grip on a society and that are part of the ecology of the human species in the same way that mud, dirt and grime and fleas are part of the world that we live in. They're not our treasures. We may give our fleas to our children, but we're not trying to. It's not a blessing. It's a curse, and I think there are a lot of cultural fleas. There are lots of things that we pass on without even noticing that we're doing it and, of course, language is a prime case of this, very little deliberate intentional language instruction goes on or has to go on. more

Brains as Clear as Jell-O for Scientists to Explore

The visible brain has arrived — the consistency of Jell-O, as transparent and colorful as a child’s model, but vastly more useful. Scientists at Stanford University reported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ. more

Rare Primate's Vocal Lip-Smacks Share Features of Human Speech

The vocal lip-smacks that geladas use in friendly encounters have surprising similarities to human speech, according to a study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 8th. The geladas, which live only in the remote mountains of Ethiopia, are the only nonhuman primate known to communicate with such a speech-like, undulating rhythm. Calls of other monkeys and apes are typically one or two syllables and lack those rapid fluctuations in pitch and volume. This new evidence lends support to the idea that lip-smacking, a behavior that many primates show during amiable interactions, could have been an evolutionary step toward human speech. more

Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé. Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available. more

Power Struggles Are Best Kept out of the Public Eye: Audiences Influence Future Status of Quails Following Fights Between Rivals

For animals, prevailing in a fight affects their likelihood of winning future conflicts. The opposite is true of losing a fight. The sex hormone testosterone is often believed to mediate this "winner effect." Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have examined whether the presence of an audience influences the behaviour and the testosterone changes of Japanese quails (Coturnix japonica) after a fight. The evidence shows that both winners and losers exhibit raised testosterone levels after a conflict without an audience. Furthermore, both winners and losers are able to maintain their social status within their group. With an audience, on the other hand, this remained true for winners, but was not the case for losers: those who had lost had neither raised testosterone levels nor were they able to maintain their dominant status within the group. Thus, informed audiences determine the future social status of a male, while testosterone plays a secondary role. more

We Aren’t the World

In the summer of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin...The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. The rules are simple: in each game there are two players who remain anonymous to each other. The first player is given an amount of money, say $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed. North Americans, who are the most common subjects for such experiments, usually offer a 50-50 split when on the giving end. When on the receiving end, they show an eagerness to punish the other player for uneven splits at their own expense. In short, Americans show the tendency to be equitable with strangers—and to punish those who are not...When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”...The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. more