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The Developmental-Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Behavior |
| Tuesday, May 29, 2007 |
| 9:00 AM–9:50 AM |
| Douglas B |
| Area: VBC; Domain: Theory |
| Chair: William F. Potter (California State University, Stanislaus) |
| DAVID MOORE (Pitzer College & Claremont Graduate University) |
 Dr. David Moore is a Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University. He received his B.A. in psychology from Tufts University, his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Harvard University, and completed a one-year National Institutes of Health post-doctoral fellowship at the City University of New York. Dr. Moore’s research explores the development of perception and cognition in infancy; his recent work has examined infants’ perception of Infant-Directed Speech and five-month-olds’ putative ‘mathematical’ abilities. He has served as a reviewer for Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Cognitive Development, and Developmental Science, among others, and was a panelist for the National Science Foundation’s 2004 Human & Social Dynamics competition. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the International Society for Infant Studies. His book The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of “Nature vs. Nurture” (Times Books/Henry Holt) was nominated for the Cognitive Development Society Best Authored Volume (2002-2003). His recent publications include Perception Precedes Computation: Can Familiarity Preferences Explain Apparent Calculation by Human Babies?, which appeared in Developmental Psychology last summer, and A Very Little Bit of Knowledge: Re-Evaluating the Meaning of the Heritability of IQ, which appeared in Human Development in December. |
| Abstract: The developmental-systems perspective holds that behavior is an aspect of biology, and that like all biological characteristics, it can be understood completely only by analyzing the interaction of the components that contribute to its development. Biologists have concluded that all of our characteristics reflect gene-environment interactions; they never result from the unfolding of genetically controlled, deterministic developmental programs. Consequently, although detailed analyses of the causes of behaviors will invariably invoke genetic factors, even behaviors posited to emerge from species-typical mental organs, like language, will remain poorly understood until the contributions of experiential factors to their development are elucidated. This is because traits develop from interactions occurring at the levels of the genes, cells, organs, and environments, and because causation is bi-directional in biological systems; thus, higher-level (e.g., social) signals can affect events at lower levels (including genetic events), giving environmental factors the means to influence biological processes. Genes act only in collaboration with environmental information, major brain structures reflect experience, and on close inspection, traits that seem innate are not innate; thus, the emergence of behavioral characteristics can be understood only via analysis of their development, a unitary process that utilizes both genetic and non-genetic resources in its realization. |
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| Reinforcement Contingencies and the Stimulus Control of Behavior: From Food to Drug Self-Administration as Reinforcers |
| Tuesday, May 29, 2007 |
| 10:00 AM–10:50 AM |
| Douglas B |
| Area: EAB; Domain: Basic Research |
| Chair: William D. Timberlake (Indiana University) |
| STANLEY J. WEISS (American University) |
 Dr. Stanley J. Weiss, Professor of Experimental Psychology at American University, and a former chair of the department, received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and his B.A. from the City College of New York. His research has been funded for over 25 years by grants and fellowships awarded by National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation and National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2003, Dr. Weiss was a Fulbright Scholar/Researcher at Pavlov Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was elected a Fellow of APA Divisions 3 (Experimental Psychology) and 25 (Experimental Analysis of Behavior). He has been a visiting professor at Cambridge University, Hebrew University, St. Andrews University, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Colorado. Dr. Weiss was elected President of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) for the 2005-2006 term and has served for many years on the EPA Board of Directors as well as the EPA Program Committee. He has been the Convener of the Winter Conference on Animal Learning & Behavior since 2002. Dr. Weiss’ research is concerned with the role of operant and classical contingencies in stimulus control and incentive motivation, the role of learning mechanisms in drug abuse, and biological constraints on learning. |
| Abstract: In his invited address, Dr. Weiss shows how the principles of stimulus control established through his research with traditional appetitive reinforcers can be applied to further our understanding of drug abuse, craving, and the loss of control that is a hallmark of addiction. He describes an instrumentally derived incentive-motive function. This function is based on the stimulus-reinforcer associations implicitly created in operant discriminative situations through the embedded reinforcement differences between schedule components. Those reinforcement contingencies that maximally energize behavior according to this function are then employed with drug self-administration (cocaine or heroin) rather than food as the reinforcer. This revealed how environmental cues related to the drug-taking experience come to energize drug-related behavior, plus how exposing rats to combinations of these cues can triple their drug seeking and even override reinforcement-related mechanisms that normally regulate drug-intake. Symmetrically, Weiss also describes how stimulus control processes can be used to decrease drug seeking. A systematic investigation of conditioned inhibition within the context of drug self-administration is presented that provides findings relevant to behavioral treatments of drug abuse. |
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