Behavior Research Lab
at CSI, Dept. of Psychology
Location:
My Behavior Research Lab
is located on the CSI campus. You can call me at (718) 982-4082 or EXT
4082 if you are calling from campus. You can also just drop by and have
a look at the lab to find out if you might be interested in studying here.
Why Work in a Lab?
Working in a lab has advantages
for undergraduate psychology majors. It's an important supplement to books-only
classes (that usually do not provide hands-on experience) while receiving
credits towards your degree (e.g., by signing up for an Independent Study
course, PSY 954). When working in a lab, you are encouraged to come up
with your own questions, to find answers, and to work out practical solutions.
It's very good training in analytical and scientific thinking. You can
learn how to conduct a literature review, and you can develop writing,
technical, and practical skills (e.g., computer technology, some electronics,
statistics, graphics, building equipment). If you are thinking about an
academic career after college (graduate
school), you have probably already realized that it is becoming more
and more important for your application that you can document research experience.
This is certainly true for experimental psychology programs but also for
programs with clinical or applied focus. It is generally understood that
a lab experience provides you with skills that are necessary in order to
do well in an academic environment. In addition, even though a good GPA
and high GRE scores are necessary to make the first cut to get into most
graduate schools, letters of recommendation will ultimately determine whether
you will be among the finalists for a good program. Letters of recommendation
are most helpful if they come from a faculty member who knows you well enough
to be specific in the letter. If you were just one of many students in a
regular lecture class, a letter of recommendation cannot be very specific
("Well, yes, s/he was in my class two years ago and received an 'A'. That's
about all I can say.") On the other hand, if you have worked in a lab, the
letter of recommendation will be written by a faculty member, your mentor/supervisor,
who knows you well and who can emphasize convincingly and honestly your good
qualities such as "bright, dependable, a 'self-starter', hard-working, works
well with others, creative, computer-literate, personable, etc.".
Prerequisites for Working in my Lab:
First of all, you should
not be a bona fide technophobe, that is, you should be willing to learn
basic computer skills. Second, if interested in experimental behavior
analysis, you should not be afraid of birds (and should not be allergic
to dust) and of some clean-up work. Third, if interested in applied behavior
analysis, you should not be afraid of people, especially not of people
with disabilities. (Even in this field, often some clean-up work is required.)
Fourth, you should be interested in analytical thinking and learning &
behavior processes. Fifth, you should make a commitment of spending about
10-12 hours a week in the lab (includes a couple of hours reading research
articles), and preferably for a minimum of two semesters (two 4-credit PSY
594). Sixth, you need to be dependable (be on time and follow your schedule,
which we can set up in the beginning of the semester to fit your and my
needs). Seventh, I'd prefer if you break up your lab hours into at least
two days per week. All these prerequisites are almost even more important
if you want to work with humans. (First of all, we need to fit into the
school's schedule and not inconvenience staff and students. Second,
it'd be unethical to waste a child's time by disorganization.)
If you are planning to get involved
in research with human participants, you will have to get certified. Certification
is free and can be done on the internet. For more details, go to the website
of the Collaborative Institutional
Training Initiative (CITI).
About Animal Research:
We keep our animals in
clean and safe rooms with ethical and health standards that probably exceed
those of pet owners or pet stores. A veterinarian is available at all
times. A multidisciplinary team monitors all research protocols. We follow
all federal, state, county, and local guidelines in treating our animals.
We can keep many of our animals for years and do not have to euthanize them
at the end of an experiment. (In fact, some of our pigeons are over 15 years
old—a pigeon's natural life span is much less—which, I think, is pretty
convincing evidence of the good treatment our pigeons are receiving.) If
you are concerned about animal rights, please don't hesitate to contact me. You can also review
the Animal
Welfare Act or visit the Animal
Welfare Information Center. For an article on the importance of animal
research, you can download/read Domjan
& Purdy (1995).
My Research Background:
My first research experience
was as an undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
in a Learning & Behavior class similar to PSY 333 (formerly PSY 381/383)
that is offered here at CSI. We learned about conditioning, simple schedules
of reinforcement, and experimental designs employing pigeons as research
subjects. Later I signed up for an independent study course (at CSI this
is a PSY 594) that involved operant conditioning, also with pigeons (concurrent-chains
schedules). My Undergraduate Honor Thesis also had to do with operant conditioning
but this time with humans (observing behavior). The general research approach
used for all of these studies is called Experimental Analysis of Behavior
(EAB). My first interest in EAB is due to the wonderful time I had as
an undergraduate student with guidance from Drs. David Case, Edmund Fantino,
Teresa Jacob, Ray Preston, George Reynolds, and Ben Williams.
During graduate school
at UCSD, I became interested in what's called Applied Behavior Analysis
(ABA). This approach utilizes the principles of EAB but attempts to apply
these principles explicitly to improve aspects of human life or functioning.
I worked under Dr. Laura Schreibman's supervision with children with autism
and their parents. (We trained the parents, relatives, siblings, caretakers,
and/or friends in the use of ABA to make them proficient primary providers
of therapy. This approach is more cost-efficient than individual therapy
provided by a health professional.) My research had to do with stimulus
control (i.e., What aspects of the child's environment are responsible
for causing normal, excessive, or deficient behavior?) In this context a
phenomenon that has been described as stimulus overselectivity interested
me most. (An autistic child may only respond to a tiny, seemingly irrelevant
feature of a much more complex stimulus situation, that is, he—most autistic
individuals are male—might be "overselective" in what he responds to. A
child may, for example, respond to intonation of speech exclusively but not
to content which essentially renders language useless as a means of communication.
We just completed a project that lead us to revise or refine the concept
of stimulus overselectvity with language stimuli.) Language and stimulus
overselectivity seemed particularly interesting to me because language is
such a critical aspect of typical human behavior.
In later years of graduate
school under Dr. Ben A. Williams' supervision, I went back to EAB. I wanted
to focus on basic research questions again. This was because I felt that
many of the stimulus control questions could be answered comprehensively
with animal subjects (pigeons) and did not necessitate the involvement
of humans. (Therapy time is expensive, therefore using animals for addressing
issues that are primarily of theoretical nature seemed more ethical to
me than involving humans. There are also several other advantages of using
nonhuman animal subjects, and animals are interesting in their own right.)
My general focus was still on stimulus control. My dissertation was on so-called
stimulus fading techniques used to produce errorless transfer of stimulus
control. These are techniques that are widely used in the applied field
to facilitate learning in terms of allowing learning to occur with few
or no errors. However, it is not clear whether these techniques also facilitate
learning in terms of speeding up the acquisition process itself (independently
of errors). I also became more interested in the field of animal learning
which includes—in addition to the study of conditioning phenomena—the study
of the biological aspects of behavior, comparative cognition, and other
learning phenomena that are relevant for human behavior.
After obtaining a doctoral
degree, it is quite common in the academic and research fields to seek
postdoctoral training. A postdoc position is supposed to provide a new
Ph.D. researcher with further research training and lab experience without
having to worry about the formalities that are associated with writing
a dissertation or about teaching responsibilities. For three years, I was
a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Philip Zeigler's lab at Hunter College, CUNY.
This is where I learned a very useful and sophisticated technology that
was developed in Dr. Phil Zeigler's lab (with Drs. Robert Allan, Roberto
Bermejo, James Deich, and Dirk Houben). This technology allows one to measure
continuously how much a pigeon opens a beak at a given moment. (We glue
a magnetosensitive microchip and a magnet on the pigeon's upper and lower
beaks with no damage to the bird's beaks. Then, by digital sampling, we record
the microchip's output that depends directly on magnetic flux and therefore
on how much the beaks are opened. You can see a picture of this on my Home Page. This technique does
not damage or hurt the pigeon.) Why is this interesting or important?
Traditionally, in EAB often one only measures when or whether a response
(peck) has occurred (response probability). This tells only part of the whole
story because information on the specific form (response topography) with
which a response occurred is lost. An interesting phenomenon is that the
response topography varies depending on a variety of factors in a conditioning
situation (e.g., pecking for lots of food has a different topography than
pecking for little food; or pecking for food has a different topography than
pecking for water). By recording response probability and response topography
at the same time, we can now ask questions about a number of interesting
behaviors. One set of behaviors seems to fall into the category of cognition
(i.e., "thinking" processes). Does the animal anticipate a specific outcome
(e.g., small pellet, large pellet, one pellet, many pellets, water, or grain)?
Does the animal know how to choose a specific outcome even if the outcome
is still far removed in time? Can the animal remember a specific outcome
for an extended time period? How is such anticipation, choice, or memory
affected by motivation levels (depending on how hungry or thirsty the bird
is)? You can download (in pdf) two papers of mine that illustrate some of
this reasoning (Ploog &
Zeigler, 1997; Ploog, 2001a). I
have also collaborated with Dr. Zeigler et al. investigating motor control
of whisking in rats (Gao, Ploog, & Zeigler, 2003).
You can download this paper, too (in pdf).
During my sabbatical, I spent the
Spring 2006 and Spring 2007 semesters at the Institut für Medizinische Psychologie
(Director Dr. Ernst Pöppel) affilliated with the Ludwig Maximilians Universität
in Munich, Germany. (Two other affiliations are The Parmenides
Foundation and The Generation
Research Program.) There I had an opportunity to work with squirrel monkeys
(very small New World monkeys). We established a small "Arbeitsgruppe" (work
team) to continue and extend this work. The research with the monkeys focuses
on stimulus control, attention, comparative cognition, and timing processes.
Since monkeys, like humans, are primates, it is possible to test a lot of
the experimental paradigms with monkeys and apply them to humans in a much
more straightforward manner than perhaps possible with pigeons. Again, the
monkeys enjoy excellent care and die only of natural causes. Specifically,
we started with replicating an experimental paradigm that we had used with
autistic children and all-tactile stimuli (Ploog & Kim, 2006). The work
with the monkeys has not been published yet.
Other papers you might find interesting: Ploog & Zeigler (1996),
Ploog & Zeigler (1997),
Ploog (2001b).
Ongoing or Planned Research Projects:
* Autoshaping in pigeons and chickens with differential
outcomes. "Innate" vs. "learned" factors.
* Perception of time in pigeons with differential
outcomes. How come that time flies when you are having fun?
* The summation effect and selective attention with
compound stimuli in pigeons.
* Serial Discrimination Reversal Learning: Collaboration
with Dr. Ben Williams at UCSD.
* Chain schedules, conditioned reinforcement, and devaluation
techniques: Collaboration with Drs. Mathew Bell (Santa Clara College, CA),
Margaret McDevitt (McDaniel College, MD), and Ben Williams (UCSD).
* Imitation learning in pigeons. Collaboration with my
colleague Ms. Anita Conte (CSI).
* Diagnosis and remediation of stimulus overselectivity
in children with autism using a custom-designed computer/video game.
* Language in children with autism. Collaboration with
my colleague Prof. Patricia Brooks (CSI), an expert in language acquisition
and cognitive development.
* Attention in squirrel monkeys (in collaboration with
the Institut für Medizinische
Psychologie).
Interested?
If any of this sounds interesting
to you, if you would like to hear more about it, or if you would like to
talk to me, you can contact me via email (ploog@mail.csi.cuny.edu) or
call me at (718) 982-4082. Running a successful lab depends to a large
degree on student involvement. I think your involvement could be a mutually
beneficial endeavor for you and me.
I am looking forward to hearing from you!
Bertram Ploog
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Last Update 21-AUG-07