Association for Behavior Analysis International

Parent-infant interaction is the primary context in which infants learn culturally valued skills. In the domain of language development, parental verbal responsiveness has consistently been found to promote infants' learning of new words. Why might this be? Here, the speaker will highlight several features of responsiveness that explain these parent-child associations: (1) Responsive behaviors are temporally connected (contiguous) and dependent upon (contingent) infant actions (i.e., exploratory or communicative behaviors), and thereby facilitate infants' mapping of words to their referents; (2) Parents are more likely to use lexically rich language in response to infant actions than in the presence of infant off-task behaviors; (3) Responsive behaviors are multi-modal in their structures, thereby provide infants with physical cues (e.g., gestures) to the words that are spoken. These principles have been demonstrated in several longitudinal studies of infant-parent interactions in families from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds (e.g. European-American, African-American, and Dominican and Mexican immigrants). Frame-by-frame coding is applied to video-recorded interactions to examine how mothers respond ("response type") to specific infant behaviors ("infant-given behavior"), and relate "infant-to-mother behavioral sequences" to children's current and later language skills. The developmental significance of parental responsiveness is observed across cultural communities and reflects universal processes of early language learning.

Behavior analysis researchers, graduate students, and practitioners.

Recent studies point to a number of learning and modulatory processes that contribute to food-seeking. Distinct learning processes mediate the acquisition of goal-directed and habitual actions and are subserved by parallel circuits involving the dorsomedial and dorsolateral striatum, respectively. In addition, food can function as an incentive, to reward actions, and as a reinforcer, to strengthen habits. Evidence suggests that two forms of incentive process affect food seeking: (i) the experienced value of a particular food based on consummatory experience, and (ii) the predicted value of a particular action based on cues that predict food delivery. Although incentive theories generally assume that these processes are mediated by a common associative mechanism, a number of recent findings suggest that they are dissociable behaviorally, anatomically, and neurochemically. The latter predictive learning process also may play a role in habitual food-seeking, particularly in the function of the reinforcement signal, long ascribed to the dopaminergic input to dorsolateral striatum which we have found is heavily regulated by the central amygdala. As the basolateral amygdala is heavily involved in reward processing, it appears the amygdala plays the generally role of parsing food events into the reward and reinforcement signals that support goal-directed and habitual action control, respectively.

Behavior analysts interested in the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and motivation, and their implications for theories of reinforcement.

Dr. Lilienfeld will begin by laying out the magnitude and scope of the science-practice gap in clinical psychology and allied fields, which refers to striking disjunction between the research evidence for intervention and assessment techniques, on the one hand, and their use in everyday clinical practice, on the other. He will then examine both the distal and proximal sources of this gap, including the resistance to systematic research evidence, with a particular eye on commonplace errors in reasoning to which all of us are prone (e.g., naive realism, confirmation bias, and illusory correlation). In addition, he will discuss the perils of neurocentrism--the assumption that the brain-based level of analysis is inherently more important than other levels of analysis in understanding human behavior--and its implications for research and practice in clinical psychology. He will close with a plea for curricular reform designed to inculcate “fallible humility”--an awareness of our own strengths and limitations as information processors--in the next generation of students.

Researchers, practitioners, instructors, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in clinical psychology.

Modern psychology has, to all intents and purposes, become synonymous with cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on the idea that the brain is some kind of computer, whose job it is to take sensory input, process information, and produce motor output. In particular, evolutionary approaches to psychology, as applied to both human and nonhuman animals, are strongly committed to this computational theory of mind, placing the brain at a remove from both the body and environment, and denying the intimate connections that exist between them. As a result, a great injustice is done to both humans and nonhuman animals: on the one hand, we fail to recognize the distinctive nature of nonhuman cognition, and on the other, we continue to promote a somewhat misleading view of human psychological capacities. Here, Dr. Barrett will suggest a more mutualistic, embodied, enactive view might allow us to ask more interesting questions about how animals of all kinds come to know their worlds, in ways that avoid both the (inevitable) anthropocentric baggage and “Cartesian disease” of the cognitivist viewpoint.