The Quito Brain and Behavior Lab

Did you know that there is an international standard research lab in Ecuador, focused on scientific psychology and neuroscience, e.g. neuropsychology and psychophysiology? It’s called the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab and is based at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In fact, I think it is the only psychology/neuroscience research lab in the country. There are quite a few other groups who put ‘neuro’ in their names, but they all simply using it as a marketing move, selling educational or psychotherapeutic services etc. We are the only ones who have been doing and publishing academic research.

The official logo of the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab. This was created by the first student to do a thesis in the lab, Marco Lopez of Escuela Superior Politécnica de Chimborazo.

The lab is run by me, Dr. Graham Pluck. I am British but have lived in Ecuador for several years. As an undergraduate psychology student at the University of Birmingham (UK) I was lucky enough to study with two great neuropsychologists- Jane Riddoch and Glyn Humphreys. Jane and Glyn were famous for their work on vision and action (they later moved to the University of Oxford and set up The Oxford Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre, and Glyn became the Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology). I did my undergraduate thesis with Jane on limb praxis, the data was eventually published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology (Riddoch et al., 2004). After graduating in Psychology I went to the Institute of Neurology, part of University College London, to do a doctorate on Parkinson’s disease with Dr. Richard Brown, also a very successful neuropsychologist. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m passionate about neuropsychology research. My own research generally involves application of neuropsychological principles to understand real-life issues. For example, cognitive studies of homeless adults (e.g. Pluck et al., 2011; Pluck et al., 2012; Pluck et al., 2015a) or street children (e.g. Pluck et al., 2015b; Pluck et al., 2018). But I have also done some more clinical-neuroscientific work, such as an fMRI study of schizophrenia (Lee et al., 2015).

They say you can judge an academic by the size of their office, true academics don't pursue flash offices because they are about the research, not the image. I hope so, my office is tiny. 

The lab is co-directed by Dr Ana Trueba. She has a bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Trinity University and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Southern Methodist University, both in Texas, the USA. In addition to being a Clinical Psychologist, and director of the University’s Master’s in Clinical Psychology Program, Ana is active in research, particularly on psychophysiology (e.g. Trueba et al., 2016a; Trueba et al., 2016b; Ritz et al., 2018). 

Ana in her office in the lab, demonstrating her unique filing system

We maintain international and national research links. I am an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield (UK) and Ana has ongoing research with colleagues in the USA, particularly Dr. Thomas Ritz at the Department of Psychology, Southern Methodist University. We also currently have national research collaborations with the University of Guayaquil and Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo, in Riobamba.

 

The Lab's Christmas pizza party

Apart from Ana and me here at the lab, we always have a few international visitors doing research here too. Recently a master’s student from the University of Amsterdam did a 3-month research placement here, and another comes from Osnabrück University in Germany in late August. Currently a speech therapy student from the University of Illinois in the USA is doing a research project with us.

Some of the students working with the lab

In addition to actual research, we also run a series of research seminars at the University. These are called the Brain Meetings. Roughly every two weeks during the teaching semesters we have guest scientists present their work on psychological and neuroscientific topics. The Brain Meetings are free to attend and open to all. If you want to keep informed of these meetings, then ‘join’ the lab on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PluckLab/

Post Script, the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab has now become Pluck Lab, within the wider USFQ Institute of Neurosciences. You can find out more about the work of the lab/Institute on the blog (Spanish): https://neurocienciasusfq.blogspot.com/

References

     Lee, K. H., Pluck, G., Lekka, N., Horton, A., Wilkinson, I. D., & Woodruff, P. W. (2015). Self-harm in schizophrenia is associated with dorsolateral prefrontal and posterior cingulate activity. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 61, 18-23.

     Pluck, G., Lee, K. H., David, R., Macleod, D. C., Spence, S. A., & Parks, R. W. (2011). Neurobehavioural and cognitive function is linked to childhood trauma in homeless adults. British Journal of Clinical Psychology ,50(1), 33-45.

     Pluck, G., Lee, K. H., David, R., Spence, S. A., & Parks, R. W. (2012). Neuropsychological and cognitive performance of homeless adults. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 44(1), 9-15.

     Pluck, G., Nakakarumai, M., & Sato, Y. (2015a). Homelessness and cognitive impairment: An exploratory study in Tokyo, Japan. East Asian Archives of Psychiatry, 25(3), 122-127.

     Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., Ricaurte-Diaz, S., & Borja-Alvarez, T. (2015b). Post-traumatic stress disorder and intellectual function of socioeconomically deprived ‘street children’ in Quito, Ecuador. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 13(2), 215-224.

     Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., & Trueba, A. F. (2018). Socioeconomic deprivation and the development of neuropsychological functions: A study with “street children” in Ecuador. Child Neuropsychology, 24, 510-523.

     Riddoch, M. J., Humphreys, G. W., Jacobson, S., Pluck, G., Bateman, A., & Edwards, M. (2004). Impaired orientation discrimination and localization following parietal damage: On the interplay between dorsal and ventral processes in visual perception. Cognitive Neuropsychology ,21(6), 597-623.

     Ritz, T., Trueba, A. F., Vogel, P. D., Auchus, R. J., & Rosenfield, D. (2018). Exhaled nitric oxide and vascular endothelial growth factor as predictors of cold symptoms after stress. Biological Psychology, 132, 116-124.

     Trueba, A., Ryan, M. W., Vogel, P. D., & Ritz, T. (2016). Effects of academic exam stress on nasal leukotriene B4 and vascular endothelial growth factor in asthma and health. Biological Psychology, 118, 44-51.

     Trueba, A. F., Simon, E., Auchus, R. J., & Ritz, T. (2016). Cortisol response to acute stress in asthma: Moderation by depressive mood. Physiology & Behavior, 159, 20-26.

Research and Publishing. 2: Where to Publish

In the previous post I wrote about why psychologists should be doing research. That post was particularly aimed at students so that they learn the proper way to be professional psychologists. This post is about where to publish research, and so may be of more interest to already qualified psychologists who are planning investigations, or are already doing it.

The issue of where to publish is an important consideration. Research that is never published is likely to be of very limited impact. Research that is published could be influencing practice not just in Ecuador, but globally, for many years. So research should be published. And by publishing I am mainly talking here of journal articles. Working with other media is OK, but it has to be carefully managed, and undertaken responsibly. Newspapers and magazines are about entertainment not truth, and journalists don’t care whether the person they are quoting is an expert on not, they just want a ‘Dr’ to say something interesting. I know, I’ve been there. Whether or not you work with the popular media, that can’t be all you do. The fact is that to be considered internationally relevant as a psychologist you have to be producing data-based journal articles.

It is best to think of where your research may be published very early in the research process. You can then tailor the research to the outlet. For example, the Journal of Adolescence has a special section for research from developing countries, these are very brief reports of up to 1000 words. Knowing that, Ecuadorian researchers could plan their investigation to nicely fit the requirement of the journal, thus maximizing the chance that the research will eventually be published. And if the research is already complete, you still need to find a very appropriate journal for it. You’ll waste everybody’s time by sending manuscripts to inappropriate journals.

In general, it is also good to think about the international outlook of the journal. Some journals are, shamefully, very euro- or gringo-centric and prefer not to publish work from countries such as Ecuador. On the other hand, some journals are proudly international. Obviously, being Ecuador-based, we will have better chances of success if we submit to journals that specifically describe themselves as being internationally focused, or at least have a history of publishing work from around the world.

Nowadays we don’t need to worry much about the impact factors of the journals. This is because the impact factor is an old metric that just tells you how successful, on average, papers in a journal have been in the past. The most basic calculation is the number of citations to the published works each year divided by the number of papers published each year. For example, on average, any paper in a journal with an impact factor of 3 will be cited about 3 times per year. However, these days we have article-level metrics, it is now more important that your work actually gets cited, regardless of the average success of the journal. Getting your work cited is the number one issue.

To do this you should try and publish in journals which are widely indexed. for example, if you publish in a journal that is indexed in Medline, PsychINFO and Scopus, it will be very accessible by other people. This will maximize the chances that your research becomes popular, is cited, and doesn’t just disappear. For researchers in Ecuador, publishing in journals that are at least indexed in Scopus is important, as this criterion is used across the country to define ‘good’ research. If you want to impress your bosses, the work must be in a Scopus-indexed journal. Good journals will list the databases that they are indexed in on their websites. And you can check some of the main database journal lists, you can download the lists of journals indexed in Scopus and in PsychINFO. So ignore the impact factors and just aim to publish in a journal which is well-indexed.

The other main issue to consider is whether your research will be locked behind a paywall. It may surprise some people, but the authors of journal articles never receive any payment for their writing. The fees charged are profits for the publishing companies. In fact, some journals now charge the authors a fee to publish, and this can be as much as $3000. These pay-to-publish journals then give away the research as free PDF downloads. So although it’s very expensive, it will help your research to get cited if it is freely distributed in this way. This method of charging the authors for the costs, not the consumers, is better for people in less-developed countries who want to access research information, as they get free access to science. Anybody with computer access can get it.

However, for the researchers in less-developed countries, such as Ecuador, this model can be a problem. In the rich countries researchers often have large research grants, and they budget in advance for these publication costs. Then their research benefits from being open-access. In Ecuador such large grants are rare so there is usually no money available to pay the publication fees. The publishing companies are somewhat sympathetic to this, and will often waive the fees for researchers based in low-income countries. However, Ecuador is considered upper-middle income, so waivers are not available. Nevertheless, if you can find ways to publish in open-access journals, this will help to get your research used and cited.

But be careful about which pay-to-publish journal you submit to. Since this publishing model began, many fake journals have appeared. They look (somewhat) like real academic journals but have very low or no publication standards, they exist mainly to take fees and care nothing about quality. These are called predatory journals, they exploit the vane and the naive, and they distort science. They get business by spam emailing people and requesting manuscripts quickly. Sometimes they don’t even read the material before publishing it. Take the example shown below, an article accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. The article consists of these words repeated over and over “Get me off your fucking mailing list”.

This paper was accepted by a predatory journal. Also shown is one of the figures from the paper. Avoid predatory journals at all costs. If in doubt Google the journal name with the word 'predatory'.

Not all pay journals are predatory, in fact some of the best journals either use this economic model solely are partially. It is now an essential skill that psychologist be able to distinguish the real from the predatory journals, and the best universities are now incorporating this training into their degrees.

It's important to learn to distinguish between real and dubious quality journals. One obvious clue is usually in the quality of the presentation. Good journals will have professional looking layout. Avoid journals that look like they were DTPed by your mum. 

Ollie is a Staffordshire terrier owned by Mike Daube, a public health expert in Perth, Australia. With Mike's help Ollie has been accepted as an editor on several predatory journals, such as Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine.

Other than predatory journals, there are other places you shouldn’t be considering. As I said above, the primary route for psychological research publication is academic journals, not newspapers, magazines etc. Books are of course useful, and may be essential to have on your resume if you want to gain tenure in the USA. If you do want to publish a book, it must be with a reputable academic publisher. These are often associated with universities. Don’t be tempted into vanity publishing. Anybody can publish a book with a vanity publisher. They take a fee and they publish your book. There is nothing particularly wrong with that. Lots of very niche works are published in this way, autobiographies of people who are not at all famous, guides to restoring mid-twentieth-century rocking chairs etc. But it is not appropriate for academic work. If you do vanity publish academic work It might impress your friends and naive colleagues. But well-educated and reputable psychologists will not be fooled, and will see it as a form of charlatanism. It’s better to have no books on your academic resume than vanity published books. The problem is that vanity publishing doesn’t really need any peer reviewing. It is this peer-review process which maintains standards.

That is why journal articles, whether pay-to-publish or not, are considered so highly. They are very selective, if the research is not good, or not well analysed, or not well written, it will be rejected. The peer reviews will be done be anonymous experts, and these are generally very strict and very critical. But it is this quality control that makes them generally trustworthy, considerably more trustworthy than journalism. They form the basis of evidence-based practice. Which is what all psychologists should be striving for.

Which leads me to my final point. Getting published in academic journals is very difficult, the work must be very well produced, and even then you can expect rejections. The best scientists in the world receive lots of rejections. You just have to persevere. But the good news is that every time it gets a little easier. Though it never gets easy. Do it.

Research and Publishing. 1: Why Research, Why Publish?

Psychology is a very young science and there is much still to be learnt, in fact most of psychology is not well understood yet. And progress towards better understanding is made through research. This is not simply an academic affair, better understanding of psychology will ultimately improve lives, as trauma, depression etc. become better understood, and better treated.

By research I mean collection of new information, this is not simply the research that one might do for an essay, searching Google, but collecting new information from the real world with surveys, experiments etc. This is why research skills are so important to psychologists. To be a good psychologist one must, at the very least, be able to understand research. Ideally, good psychologists would also be skilled at doing it. Without such research skills it is impossible to be truly evidence based, and if psychologists are not evidence based then they are at serious risks of falling into quackery and pseudoscience. This, unfortunately, characterizes much of current Ecuadorian psychology.

It is therefore imperative for Ecuadorian psychologists to become research active. This is not easy, as many undergraduate psychology degrees in Ecuador lack the capacity to offer strong training in research skills, and there are few postgraduate options. This is unfortunate, as in other counties, such as the UK, psychology graduates are usually the most research-skilled graduates of all. But the situation here in Ecuador will not improve unless we push for it. And the fact is that there are some psychologists here with strong research skills. At the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab we have lots of collaborations with professors both within and without Universidad San Francisco de Quito. We also have lots of research assistants and interns, mainly doing unpaid work. But by collaborating and assisting they are all learning about research and developing skills. The message is that you don’t necessarily need formal training to get into research.

Research when it is performed, must then be published. Research that is not published to a global audience is not of much use. And publication should be in journal articles. I’ll discuss the issues of where, e.g. which journals, in the next blog post. But the for the moment it is important to understand that journal articles are the basic method of transmitting high-level research. Research published  by the London School of Economics suggested that in their survey of social scientists, about 63% or all publications are journal articles, and only about 17% are books. The other 20% is made of various other outputs such as ‘Working and Discussion’ papers. For scientists, including psychologists, I suspect the percentage for journal articles would be even higher. Psychology students should be reading journal articles, and professional psychologists should be writing journal articles.

Academic journals are the most important source of information for academics, including psychologists.

Journals are the basic source because they are peer-reviewed. That means they go through a tough process, being reviewed by anonymous experts from around the world. The majority of articles that are submitted to journals are rejected. And those that are accepted are usually only accepted after being revised based on the anonymous experts’ criticisms, sometimes with several rounds of revisions. It is the strict checking process that means journal articles are more reliable than any other sources of academic information. Newspapers and magazines are written for entertainment not information, and books in general are less trustworthy than many people realize. It is now recognized for example that many, many psychology textbooks contain grossly incorrect descriptions of basic psychological studies and phenomena.

Journals are therefore the basic vehicle of academic research. And researchers are judged mainly on their journal articles. I did my PhD at the Institute of Neurology in London. At the time I was there, the head of the Institute was Professor David Marsden. He was a remarkable scientist-practitioner. and it is said that from the date he graduated as a doctor to his death at age 60, he published 740 journal articles, 208 book chapters, 76 reviews and 100 research letters. An average of one publication every 12 days. This is a truly exceptional research output. Some academics never publish anything in their entire careers. It is notable too that David Marsden was also a clinician. He provides a fine example that clinical and academic are not polar. It may be that clinicians working solely in clinical practice don’t need to research, but those clinicians that also work at a University are also consequently academics. And academics should be involved in research. The point is that academics, whether clinical or not, are judged on their research output, mainly concerning their journal articles.

I have a book on Behavioral Neurology that was presented to David Marsden when winning the American Academy of Neurology Norman Geshwind Award. This is the inscription in the book that is also signed by many leading neuroscientists. An inspirational scientist-practitioner, David Marsden died suddenly just six months after receiving this award. 

So how do we judge research output? People used to talk about impact factors of journals, as a proxy measure for the quality of publications. But really the academic world has moved on from impact factors anyway. Nowadays individual journal articles are all digitally linked together on the internet via their reference lists. It’s easy to see how many times an article has been cited by other journal articles or books. Several different databases calculate this data and display it publicly. The most obvious example is Google Scholar. So rather than look at the impact factor of a journal where a piece of research was published, we can actually see how useful the individual article in question has been. And there is a lot of variation. Some journal articles never, ever, get cited by anybody. Some fly and are cited hundreds of times each year.

Google Scholar shows how many cites every article or book has. We can see in this example that the article by K. Anders Ericsson and Herb Simon was very successful, having been cited 5,688 times since it was published in 1980, which is more useful than knowing the impact factor of the journal. 

So, the real measure of an article’s success, and hence the author’s success, is how many times it has been cited. This is much better than simply looking at the number of articles published, or the impact factors of the journals, or the related metric of whether it’s Q1, Q2 etc. Now we can get a decent estimate of the quality of any individual academic’s research output.

We can look at how many times an academic has been cited. That is a good indication of their success in research. An interesting and commonly used metric is the h-index. This is a single number that captures both the number of articles somebody has published, and how well cited they have been. It is calculated as the highest number of articles that have been cited that same number of times. For example, at the time of writing, I have about 45 published journal articles. Some are highly cited and some are not, overall, I’ve been cited 1,661 times, but I have 18 articles that have all been cited at least 18 times each. My h-index is therefore 18.

This h-index is now a common way to evaluate academics. I’ve been to international conferences in which when the next guest speaker is introduced, their h-index score is publicly announced. By this metric, the most success psychologist in the world has been Herb Simon, who, at the time of writing this, has been cited 323,706 times. He has an h-index of 172. Puts my h-index of 18 into perspective. The research described above from the London School of Economics suggested that in social sciences in general the h-indices of university professors are quite low, ranging from an average of about 2.2 for Law professors to 7.6 for Economics professors. No data was given for Psychology Professors but I’d guess that it may be higher, given the significant research culture in Psychology.

Herb Simon was a truly remarkable academic. A leader in psychology, economics and artificial intelligence, he received a Nobel Prize in 1978 and is the most cited psychologist ever based on his h-index. I attended  the Cognitive Science Society meeting in Edinburgh six months after his death.  Several delegates there were in tears when talking about him. 

So why research and publish? Because it makes psychology better and makes us better psychologists. And it's what academics do. It's that simple.

In the next blog post I'll deal with the issue of where to publish.

'Street Children' of Latin America

One of my research interests is on how socioeconomic factors interact with cognitive and brain development. I’ve done studies with homeless adults in the UK and Japan, and have a study planned here in Ecuador. However, in Quito, the most conspicuous aspect of socioeconomic deprivation from a psychological perspective is the ‘street children’. This is in fact a common feature of several Latin American cities.

A street child that I photographed in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay. Children selling things to motorists is a common feature of life in many Latin American countries

Street children are a very poorly defined group, and perhaps the term shouldn’t be used at all. It really just means very poor young people who spend a lot of time unsupervised in urban environments. They are not necessarily homeless, and in fact most may have homes to go to and may even be attending school. In Quito the reason for being in the streets is usually to earn money, selling candies on buses and in bars, or shining shoes. I published some musings on this issue of definition a couple of years ago on Favelas@LSE (Pluck, 2015a).

Shoe-shine boys in Quito's Centro Historico. Many 'street children' are really working children. 

Nevertheless, the term sticks, as ‘street children’ is useful shorthand. The research I did was with students of Universidad San Francisco de Quito who helped as research assistants. We interviewed 37 former street children attending an educational program in south Quito. The first part of this was an evaluation of traumatic experiences. That revealed a very high rate of exposure to violence, and consequent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In fact, about 60% of the children we spoke to met criteria for PTSD (Pluck, Banda-Cruz, Andrade-Guimaraes, Ricaurte-Diaz, & Borja-Alvarez, 2015).  For that part of the research I was interviewed by Universidad San Francisco de Quito and they put a video clip about the research on YouTube.

A video about my street children research made by Universidad San Francisco de Quito

Next we collected data on a group of 26 ‘control’ children who had never been street connected. Both the street children and control children were assessed with several tests of cognitive function. These included a test of fluid intelligence, a test of visuospatial ability, and two tests of executive functioning, the Towers Test and Design Fluency. The reason that we were interested in these functions was that some of the anthropological literature has suggested that street children may fair remarkable well, and may even develop in some ways better than children who stay at home (in probable poverty and possible abuse). On the other hand, the medical literature on substance abuse, psychological trauma, exposure to violence etc. suggests that being street connected is particularly toxic to child development. A literature review that I did a couple years earlier tended to agree with that, in several studies from around the world, samples of street children were shown to perform poorly compared to non-street-connected children (Pluck, 2013).

Another photo of a child street vendor in north Quito, this was featured on the front cover of the Psychologist magazine. Inside was a review article titled 'The Street Children of Latin America' (Pluck, 2015b)

Our own data from Quito tended to agree with the medical view, the street children that we encountered scored quite badly on all of the cognitive tests, significantly worse than the control group. However, we did find some evidence that executive functions might be relatively preserved (Pluck, Banda-Cruz, Andrade-Guimaraes, & Trueba, 2018). This partly agrees with the anthropological perceptive, that the special challenges of being in the street environment as a child may drive the development of some abilities.

We also collected data on Theory of Mind ability in the same sample of street children. Those tests were measures of mentalizing, i.e. the ability to understand the mental contents of other people. We hypothesized that this could be enhanced in children who have to live in a competitive adult world. However, that data has proven quite a challenge to analyse. We are now collecting extra control data and hopefully should be able to add something new to the research literature soon.

Pluck, G. (2013). Cognitive abilities of ‘street children’: A systematic review. Chuo Journal of Policy Sciences and Cultural Studies, 21, 121-133. PDF

Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., Ricaurte-Diaz, S., & Borja-Alvarez, T. (2015). Post-traumatic stress disorder andintellectual function of socioeconomically deprived ‘street children’ in Quito,Ecuador. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 13(2), 215-224. PDF

Pluck, G. (2015a). Challenges and strengths, thinking about´street children´. Favelas@LSE. PDF

Pluck, G. (2015b). The 'street children' of Latin America. The Psychologist, 28(1), 20-23. PDF

Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., & Trueba, A. F. (2018). Socioeconomicdeprivation and the development of neuropsychological functions: A study with“street children” in Ecuador. Child Neuropsychology, 24(4), 510-523. PDF