Association for Behavior Analysis International

Constraint-induced (CI) therapy is a family of neurorehabilitation treatments that involve shaping and other behavioral procedures to substantially improve motor deficits produced by brain damage. Its main application has been to stroke patients, but the basic procedure has also been used with patients with traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis, and modified protocols have been used for patients with cerebral palsy and other motor deficits due to brain damage in pediatric patients (pediatric CI therapy), language in aphasia patients (CI Aphasia therapy-CIAT), focal hand dystonia and phantom limb pain. The efficacy of CI therapy for stroke patients has been established by a multi-site randomized clinical trial (JAMA, 2006; Lancet Neurol., 2008) and numerous single-site randomized controlled trials. It may be viewed as behavior analysis' contribution to the field of neurorehabilitation.

The pervasiveness of decision-making in literally every area of human endeavor highlights the importance of understanding how choice mechanisms work and their detailed relationship to underlying neurobiological function. This talk surveys the recent and productive application of game theoretic probes (economic games) to mental disorders. Such games typically possess concrete concepts of optimal play, thus providing quantitative ways to track when subjects' choices deviate from optimal. This feature equips economic games with natural classes of control signals that should guide learning and choice in the agents that play them. These signals and their underlying physical correlates in the brain are now being used to generate objective biomarkers that may prove useful for exposing and understanding the neurogenetic basis of normal and pathological human cognition.

Mental illnesses are not spread evenly around the globe and across history. In a talk based on his recent book, Watters will review work by cross-cultural psychiatrists that has shown that mental illnesses appear in different cultures and periods in history in endlessly complex and unique forms. Because the troubled "mind" has been perceived in terms of diverse religious, scientific, and social beliefs of discrete cultures, "madness" in one place and time often looks remarkably different from "madness" in another. But with increasing globalization, things are changing quickly. The remarkable diversity once seen among different cultures' conceptions of madness is disappearing. Mental illnesses identified and popularized in the United States are spreading across cultural boundaries with the speed of contagious diseases. Indigenous forms of mental illness and healing are being replaced by disease categories and treatments made in the USA. To lay bare these international trends, Watters will explore four case studies: the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong in the 1990s; the spread of post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma therapy to Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami; the changing notions of schizophrenia in Zanabar; and the selling of depression to Japan after that market was open to serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

In this talk, I'll explore the idea that when humans communicate, they engage in a process of joint prediction. When talking, speakers use a rich set of cultural and experiential priors to produce behavior that they expect will change the beliefs or behavior of others. Speakers use semantic cues to activate appropriate linguistic units. These words and chunks, along with other developing contextual cues, then activate subsequent linguistic units as speakers generate the utterances they believe are most likely to bring about changes in listeners' beliefs or behavior. At the same time, listeners, far from being passive decoders of tokens of meaning, are using broadly the same process to predictively build up their understanding of what is being said. Listeners use both learned semantic cues to words, and words themselves as cues to other words, in order to predict the behavior and intentions of speakers. Successful communication thus relies both on the collaboration between speaker and listener, and the degree to which shared prior knowledge enables mutual predictability. An attractive property of this approach is that it allows human communication to be couched in terms compatible with theories of learning.