I’ve lived for almost eight years in Ecuador, and directed a research group at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Originally known as the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab, it more recently developed into the USFQ Institute of Neurosciences. Over that time, I’ve collaborated with many academics and clinicians in Ecuador and together we have conducted several research studies, resulting in lots of publications in journals. In fact, we have been the most productive psychology research group in the country. Here is a summary of that research, and an opportunity for me to acknowledge the collaborators, students and assistants. Although I wrote all the papers, all the data was collected by the research assistants and collaborators, and without them there wouldn’t have been a lab, or any research conducted.
Street-children, and foster care
A project on trauma and neuropsychological function of Quito street children was the very first project we undertook. Without a research grant, I had to pay all costs myself. I couldn’t even find help with the cost of photocopying. But I did manage to enlist three unpaid volunteers: Daniel Banda Cruz, Victoria Andrade, and Sofia Ricaurte. These three were all undergraduate students at the time, in my Health Psychology Class at USFQ. Fundeporte, a center for very poor children in south Quito, agreed to help us with this research, under the condition that we participate with their center. So, for several days Daniel, Vicky, Sofia and I attended and played with the kids, joined them at meal times, and attended their sports day competitions.
When the staff and kids were familiar with us, then we were able to start the data collection. We also attended a Quito school and collected the same data on their kids as a control sample. Overall, the street kids project was a great success, resulting in two data papers (Pluck et al., 2015; Pluck et al., 2018) and also a review article published in the Psychologist magazine (Pluck, 2015a), and an invited opinion piece on the Favelas Blog at the London School of Economics (Pluck 2015b). And most recently, an invited chapter in a book on Homelessness and Mental Illness to be published by Oxford University Press. USFQ even made a short promotional video about the research, which is available on YouTube.
We also performed a similar study on children living in foster care in Quito. These were compared with a control group from two schools in the city. This research was conducted by Cris Hugo, and assisted by Isa Lara and Mario Martínez among others. One manuscript has been prepared on that project, but not yet accepted for publication. Isa is working on a second manuscript.
Binaural beats
The next main project happened because a biophysics student at the Escuela Superior Politécnica de Chimborazo (ESPOCH) contacted me about project supervision. The student, Marco López, wanted to do an electroencephalography (EEG) study, and that wasn’t available at his university. In fact, I didn’t have the equipment either, but I offered to support a behavioral study. Marco wanted to examine binaural beats, the illusory acoustic phenomenon that occur when pure tones of different frequencies are delivered dichotically through headphones. We did the study, discovering that stimulation at 6Hz produced a mild fear response, and it was published in Psychology & Neuroscience (Pluck & López-Águila, 2019). This publication helped Marco to get a full scholarship for postgraduate study at Tianjin University in China.
More recently, I have collaborated with Dr Diego Benítez in the USFQ Colegio de Ciencias e Ingenierías. Diego provided us with EEG equipment, and we repeated our original study, but this time with neurophysiological recordings. This project was assisted by an intern from the UK, Emma McFadden, and an exchange student from Tulane University in the USA, Rachel Maue. We successfully replicated the induction of fear with 6Hz stimulation, but the EEG data has not been fully analysed yet. Hopefully when it is, we will detect the 6Hz in the brain electrophysiological signal.
Cognitive test development
One of the first research problems that I encountered here in Ecuador, is that there is a doubt over the validity of cognitive tests. This makes it hard to publish research (such as the foster care study). So, as a long-term goal, I started reliability and validity of studies of common cognitive tests. First was the Word Accentuation Test (WAT), assisted by Andrea Gonzales and Rafa Muñoz. This test allows psychologists to estimate premorbid ability of participants/clients, even if they have current cognitive impairments (Pluck et al., 2017). A couple of related tests, the Word Accentuation Test-Sentences and the Stem Completion Implicit Reading Test (SCIRT) were also validated (Pluck, 2018). I also produced another test that previously wasn’t available in Spanish. The Spot-the-Word test is a popular assessment in English to measure verbal knowledge. My Spanish language version (Spanish Lexical Decision Task) is valid and reliable (Pluck, in press), the tests can be downloaded from my website: www.gpluck.co.uk
I also realized that even common tests such as the Wechsler intelligence assessments are not valid in developing countries such as Ecuador, and even if you ignore that fact and use them in research, they are very expensive. My solution was to produce a free-to-use, simple intelligence test, that could be used for research anywhere in the World. Overall this was more difficult to achieve than I anticipated, but the Matrix Matching Test was eventually published (Pluck, 2019). A benefit of this test in Ecuador is that it was specifically validated there, unlike all the other intelligence tests. This can also be downloaded from my website: www.gpluck.co.uk
Nevertheless, we have also collected data to normalize the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV (WAIS-IV) in Ecuador. To do this Andrea Gonzales and I collected data in Quito, while Jose Hernandez collected data in Manta, Dr Patricia Bravo collected data in Rio Bamba and Dr Mayorga Amalín collected data in Guayaquil. This data has not been published yet, but should allow us to establish the normal mean point for Ecuador. This will aid in clinical and research work.
A further test that we examined the psychometric properties of was the Tower Test. This is a commonly used assessment of executive function. However, executive function tests are rarely assessed for reliability or validity. With Doenya Amraoui (intern from the University of Amsterdam) and Isabella Fornell Villalobos (USFQ student) I examined the Tower Test in Ecuadorian youth, and found that it performed quite poorly, with only one performance measure found to be sufficiently reliable, the time-per-move ratio (Pluck et al., 2019, in press). That measure is probably the best for clinical or research use, in Ecuador, and worldwide.
Executive functioning
The next project that we undertook was to predict academic achievement of university students with executive function tests. To start the research, I recruited a research assistant, Jaime Vintimilla, who I rapidly replaced with Bernardo Ruales. Also assisting with administration was Karla Haro. We collected data on 64 undergraduate students, using a range of executive function tests. This allowed us to show that one test in particular, the Hayling Test of verbal response suppression, was a better predictor of student achievement than intelligence (Pluck et al., 2016).
In fact, later on a student from the USFQ master’s program in Mind, Brain, and Education, David Villagómez, started his graduation thesis with me. As did Maria Isabel Karolys, who was doing her masters at the Universidad International de la Rioja, in Spain, but I provided local supervision. They performed similar studies, using the Hayling verbal suppression test, assisted by two USFQ undergraduates, Pamela Almeida and Emilia Montaño. This time we included high school children in the sample. Together, we were able to replicate and extend the results, showing the verbal response suppression really is a good, perhaps the best, predictor of grades, and that working memory is a predictor of classroom misbehavior (Pluck, Villagomez-Pacheco, et al., 2019). This provides real-life validation for the role of response suppression in intelligent goal-directed behavior. The modified Hayling test that we developed is available to download from my website at www.gpluck.co.uk
Most recently, with Dr Cris Crespo and Patricia Parreño at USFQ, we performed a similar study, attempting to predict real-life success with executive function tests. However, this time we recruited 90 car sales personnel, and we looked at how many cars they sold. This involved a research team (including Karla Haro and Alejandra Martínez) travelling around Quito to different showrooms, and administering a battery of executive function tests. We again found that verbal response suppression measured by the Hayling test was the best predictor of success of salesmen. However, it wasn’t predictive for saleswomen, for whom a different form of response suppression ability predicted sales. Interesting, in this research we also found a dissociation between intelligence and multi-tasking between men and women. Salesmen had higher intelligence test scores than saleswomen, but worse multi-tasking ability (Pluck, Crespo-Andrade et al., in press).
Neuroscience of education
I was also approached by Dr Patricia Bravo Mancero, a professor at Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo (Unach), who wanted to conduct a neuroscience of education research study at her institution. I designed for her a study in which several different cognitive tests, and a set of neurobehavioral questionnaires were applied to psychology and engineering students at Unach. At this point Isabela Lara joined the team, helping to produce the tests, and eventually Isa and I went to Unach to train their professors there on how to apply them. This turned out to be a very productive collaboration resulting in two good research papers. One on cognition and academic achievement, suggesting that procedural memory is more important than declarative memory (Pluck et al., 2019), the other on neurobehavioral traits, suggesting that schizotypy and mixed handedness are important to academic achievement (Pluck, Bravo Mancero, et al., 2020). For that latter paper, Paola Chacon assisted with a psychometric study of scale reliability.
Homelessness
I had already conduced some studies of homelessness and neuropsychological function in the UK and Japan, but had not had the opportunity in Ecuador. Then came along Brittany Barajas, a student of Speech and Language Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was spending a year in Quito and wanted to do a study of language ability of homeless adults. We put together a project, and Brittany was able to receive funding from her university. With a team of Ecuadorian psychologists including Jose Hernandez, Gonzalo Villa, Alejandra Martínez, and Sarahí Pontón, we interviewed a group of homeless people at a charitable center in Quito. We also interviewed a control group of adults with similar educational backgrounds to the homeless participants. All were assessed with the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination and several other tests. We were able to show that the homeless sample had pathologically poor oral expression and comprehension. That paper has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders (Pluck, Barajas, et al. in press).
Other studies, other researchers
There were other studies too, e.g. a study of socioeconomic deprivation and cognitive skill, a study of smart phone addiction, but these projects have not been analysed and published yet. I should also mention Dr Ana Trueba who provided general support to several of the projects. Some of the other researchers that have contributed are Nicole Schmidt, Pablo Barrera, Wilmary Rodriguez, Allison Loaiza, Brenda Guerrero, Edgar Paucar-Guerra, and Marco Cordoba. Sorry of I’ve missed anybody out. Looking back it’s hard to recall all the people who have worked in the lab, and allowed us to be the most successful psychology research group in Ecuador.
References
Pluck, G. (in press). A lexical decision task for measuring crystallized-verbal ability in Spanish. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología.
Pluck, G. (2019). Preliminary validation of a free-to-use, brief assessment of adult intelligence for research purposes: The Matrix Matching Test. Psychological Reports. 122(2), 709-730. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118762589
Pluck, G . (2018). Lexical reading ability predicts academic achievement at university level. Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22(3), 175-196. https://doi.org/10.24193/cbb.2018.22.12
Pluck, G. (2015a). The 'street children' of Latin America. The Psychologist, 28(1), 20-23. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/january-2015/street-children-latin-america
Pluck, G. (2015b). Challenges and strengths, thinking about´ street children´. Favelas@LSE. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63058/1/Challenges%20and%20strengths%2C%20thinking%20about%20%C2%B4street%20children%C2%B4%20_%20Favelas%20at%20LSE.pdf
Pluck, G., Almeida-Meza, P., Gonzales-Lorza, A., Muñoz-Ycaza, R., & Trueba, A. (2017). Estimación de la función cognitiva premorbida con el Test de Acentuación de Palabras. Revista Ecuatoriana de Neurología, 26(3), 226-234. http://scielo.senescyt.gob.ec/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2631-25812017000200226
Pluck, G., Amraoui, D., & Fornell-Villalobos, I. (2019, in press). Brief Communication: Reliability of the D-KEFS Tower Test in samples of children and adolescents in Ecuador. Applied Neuropsychology: Child. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622965.2019.1629922
Pluck, G., Barajas, B. M., Hernandez-Rodriguez, J. L., Martínez, M. A. (in press). Language ability and adult homelessness. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12521
Pluck, G., Bravo Mancero,P., Maldonado Gavilanez, C. E. Urquizo Alcívar, A .M., Ortíz Encalada, P. A.,Tello Carrasco, E. …Trueba, A. F. (2019). Modulation of striatum based non-declarative and medial temporal lobe based declarative memory predicts academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 14, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2018.11.002
Pluck, G., Bravo Mancero, P., Ortíz Encalada, P.A., Urquizo Alcívar, A. M., Maldonado Gavilanez, C. E., & Chacon, P. (2020). Differential associations of neurobehavioral traits and cognitive ability to academic achievement in higher education. Trends in Neuroscience and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2019.100124
Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., Ricaurte-Diaz, S., & Borja-Alvarez, T. (2015). 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-014-9523-0
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(4), 510-523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2017.1294150
Pluck, G., Crespo-Andrade, C., Parreño, P, Haro, K. I., Martínez, M. A. & Pontón, S. C. (in press). Executive functions and intelligent goal-directed behavior: A neuropsychological approach to understanding success using professional sales as a real-life measure. Psychology & Neuroscience. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pne0000195
Pluck, G. & López-Águila, M. A. (2019). Induction of fear but no effects on cognitive fluency by theta frequency auditory binaural beat stimulation. Psychology & Neuroscience 12(1), 53-64. https://doi.org/10.1037/pne0000166
Pluck, G., Ruales-Chieruzzi, C. B., Paucar-Guerra, E. J., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., & Trueba, A. F. (2016). Separate contributions of general intelligence and right prefrontal neurocognitive functions to academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 5(4), 178-185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2016.07.002
Pluck, G., Villagomez-Pacheco, D., Karolys, M. I., Montaño-Córdova, M. E. & Almeida-Meza, P. (2019). Response suppression, strategy application, and working memory in the prediction of academic performance and classroom misbehavior: A neuropsychological approach. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 17, 100121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2019.100121
Street-children, and foster care
A project on trauma and neuropsychological function of Quito street children was the very first project we undertook. Without a research grant, I had to pay all costs myself. I couldn’t even find help with the cost of photocopying. But I did manage to enlist three unpaid volunteers: Daniel Banda Cruz, Victoria Andrade, and Sofia Ricaurte. These three were all undergraduate students at the time, in my Health Psychology Class at USFQ. Fundeporte, a center for very poor children in south Quito, agreed to help us with this research, under the condition that we participate with their center. So, for several days Daniel, Vicky, Sofia and I attended and played with the kids, joined them at meal times, and attended their sports day competitions.
When the staff and kids were familiar with us, then we were able to start the data collection. We also attended a Quito school and collected the same data on their kids as a control sample. Overall, the street kids project was a great success, resulting in two data papers (Pluck et al., 2015; Pluck et al., 2018) and also a review article published in the Psychologist magazine (Pluck, 2015a), and an invited opinion piece on the Favelas Blog at the London School of Economics (Pluck 2015b). And most recently, an invited chapter in a book on Homelessness and Mental Illness to be published by Oxford University Press. USFQ even made a short promotional video about the research, which is available on YouTube.
We also performed a similar study on children living in foster care in Quito. These were compared with a control group from two schools in the city. This research was conducted by Cris Hugo, and assisted by Isa Lara and Mario Martínez among others. One manuscript has been prepared on that project, but not yet accepted for publication. Isa is working on a second manuscript.
 |
| Sofia Ricaurte being interviewed about the street children research in the promotional video (left), our research on the front cover of the Psychologist magazine in January 2015 (center). Isa Lara and Cris Hugo working on the foster care project (right). |
Binaural beats
The next main project happened because a biophysics student at the Escuela Superior Politécnica de Chimborazo (ESPOCH) contacted me about project supervision. The student, Marco López, wanted to do an electroencephalography (EEG) study, and that wasn’t available at his university. In fact, I didn’t have the equipment either, but I offered to support a behavioral study. Marco wanted to examine binaural beats, the illusory acoustic phenomenon that occur when pure tones of different frequencies are delivered dichotically through headphones. We did the study, discovering that stimulation at 6Hz produced a mild fear response, and it was published in Psychology & Neuroscience (Pluck & López-Águila, 2019). This publication helped Marco to get a full scholarship for postgraduate study at Tianjin University in China.
More recently, I have collaborated with Dr Diego Benítez in the USFQ Colegio de Ciencias e Ingenierías. Diego provided us with EEG equipment, and we repeated our original study, but this time with neurophysiological recordings. This project was assisted by an intern from the UK, Emma McFadden, and an exchange student from Tulane University in the USA, Rachel Maue. We successfully replicated the induction of fear with 6Hz stimulation, but the EEG data has not been fully analysed yet. Hopefully when it is, we will detect the 6Hz in the brain electrophysiological signal.
 |
| The original behavioral data collection by Marco Lopez from ESPOCH for the binaural beats study (left), practicing EEG for the later study with Dr Diego Benítez and his assistant (center), and Emma McFadden measuring the head of a participant in order to position the EEG electrodes (right). |
Cognitive test development
One of the first research problems that I encountered here in Ecuador, is that there is a doubt over the validity of cognitive tests. This makes it hard to publish research (such as the foster care study). So, as a long-term goal, I started reliability and validity of studies of common cognitive tests. First was the Word Accentuation Test (WAT), assisted by Andrea Gonzales and Rafa Muñoz. This test allows psychologists to estimate premorbid ability of participants/clients, even if they have current cognitive impairments (Pluck et al., 2017). A couple of related tests, the Word Accentuation Test-Sentences and the Stem Completion Implicit Reading Test (SCIRT) were also validated (Pluck, 2018). I also produced another test that previously wasn’t available in Spanish. The Spot-the-Word test is a popular assessment in English to measure verbal knowledge. My Spanish language version (Spanish Lexical Decision Task) is valid and reliable (Pluck, in press), the tests can be downloaded from my website: www.gpluck.co.uk
I also realized that even common tests such as the Wechsler intelligence assessments are not valid in developing countries such as Ecuador, and even if you ignore that fact and use them in research, they are very expensive. My solution was to produce a free-to-use, simple intelligence test, that could be used for research anywhere in the World. Overall this was more difficult to achieve than I anticipated, but the Matrix Matching Test was eventually published (Pluck, 2019). A benefit of this test in Ecuador is that it was specifically validated there, unlike all the other intelligence tests. This can also be downloaded from my website: www.gpluck.co.uk
Nevertheless, we have also collected data to normalize the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV (WAIS-IV) in Ecuador. To do this Andrea Gonzales and I collected data in Quito, while Jose Hernandez collected data in Manta, Dr Patricia Bravo collected data in Rio Bamba and Dr Mayorga Amalín collected data in Guayaquil. This data has not been published yet, but should allow us to establish the normal mean point for Ecuador. This will aid in clinical and research work.
 |
| Me (Dr Graham Pluck) training Mayorga Amalín of Universidad de Guayaquil in cognitive test administration. This is part of the effort to norm the WAIS-IV. |
Executive functioning
The next project that we undertook was to predict academic achievement of university students with executive function tests. To start the research, I recruited a research assistant, Jaime Vintimilla, who I rapidly replaced with Bernardo Ruales. Also assisting with administration was Karla Haro. We collected data on 64 undergraduate students, using a range of executive function tests. This allowed us to show that one test in particular, the Hayling Test of verbal response suppression, was a better predictor of student achievement than intelligence (Pluck et al., 2016).
In fact, later on a student from the USFQ master’s program in Mind, Brain, and Education, David Villagómez, started his graduation thesis with me. As did Maria Isabel Karolys, who was doing her masters at the Universidad International de la Rioja, in Spain, but I provided local supervision. They performed similar studies, using the Hayling verbal suppression test, assisted by two USFQ undergraduates, Pamela Almeida and Emilia Montaño. This time we included high school children in the sample. Together, we were able to replicate and extend the results, showing the verbal response suppression really is a good, perhaps the best, predictor of grades, and that working memory is a predictor of classroom misbehavior (Pluck, Villagomez-Pacheco, et al., 2019). This provides real-life validation for the role of response suppression in intelligent goal-directed behavior. The modified Hayling test that we developed is available to download from my website at www.gpluck.co.uk
 |
| Some of the researchers who have worked in the lab at USFQ, from left to right: Brittany Barajas, Doenya Amraoui, Nergiz Turgut, Alejandra Martínez, Sarahí Pontón, Rachel Maue, Christine Bock, Marco Cordova, Emma McFadden. |
Most recently, with Dr Cris Crespo and Patricia Parreño at USFQ, we performed a similar study, attempting to predict real-life success with executive function tests. However, this time we recruited 90 car sales personnel, and we looked at how many cars they sold. This involved a research team (including Karla Haro and Alejandra Martínez) travelling around Quito to different showrooms, and administering a battery of executive function tests. We again found that verbal response suppression measured by the Hayling test was the best predictor of success of salesmen. However, it wasn’t predictive for saleswomen, for whom a different form of response suppression ability predicted sales. Interesting, in this research we also found a dissociation between intelligence and multi-tasking between men and women. Salesmen had higher intelligence test scores than saleswomen, but worse multi-tasking ability (Pluck, Crespo-Andrade et al., in press).
Neuroscience of education
I was also approached by Dr Patricia Bravo Mancero, a professor at Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo (Unach), who wanted to conduct a neuroscience of education research study at her institution. I designed for her a study in which several different cognitive tests, and a set of neurobehavioral questionnaires were applied to psychology and engineering students at Unach. At this point Isabela Lara joined the team, helping to produce the tests, and eventually Isa and I went to Unach to train their professors there on how to apply them. This turned out to be a very productive collaboration resulting in two good research papers. One on cognition and academic achievement, suggesting that procedural memory is more important than declarative memory (Pluck et al., 2019), the other on neurobehavioral traits, suggesting that schizotypy and mixed handedness are important to academic achievement (Pluck, Bravo Mancero, et al., 2020). For that latter paper, Paola Chacon assisted with a psychometric study of scale reliability.
 |
| Isa Lara and I went to Unach in Riobamba to train Dr Patricia Bravo and other professors on test administration for the neuroscience of education project. |
Homelessness
I had already conduced some studies of homelessness and neuropsychological function in the UK and Japan, but had not had the opportunity in Ecuador. Then came along Brittany Barajas, a student of Speech and Language Sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was spending a year in Quito and wanted to do a study of language ability of homeless adults. We put together a project, and Brittany was able to receive funding from her university. With a team of Ecuadorian psychologists including Jose Hernandez, Gonzalo Villa, Alejandra Martínez, and Sarahí Pontón, we interviewed a group of homeless people at a charitable center in Quito. We also interviewed a control group of adults with similar educational backgrounds to the homeless participants. All were assessed with the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination and several other tests. We were able to show that the homeless sample had pathologically poor oral expression and comprehension. That paper has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders (Pluck, Barajas, et al. in press).
 |
| Alejandra and Brittany assessing language skills in the homeless research study |
Other studies, other researchers
There were other studies too, e.g. a study of socioeconomic deprivation and cognitive skill, a study of smart phone addiction, but these projects have not been analysed and published yet. I should also mention Dr Ana Trueba who provided general support to several of the projects. Some of the other researchers that have contributed are Nicole Schmidt, Pablo Barrera, Wilmary Rodriguez, Allison Loaiza, Brenda Guerrero, Edgar Paucar-Guerra, and Marco Cordoba. Sorry of I’ve missed anybody out. Looking back it’s hard to recall all the people who have worked in the lab, and allowed us to be the most successful psychology research group in Ecuador.
References
Pluck, G. (in press). A lexical decision task for measuring crystallized-verbal ability in Spanish. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología.
Pluck, G. (2019). Preliminary validation of a free-to-use, brief assessment of adult intelligence for research purposes: The Matrix Matching Test. Psychological Reports. 122(2), 709-730. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118762589
Pluck, G . (2018). Lexical reading ability predicts academic achievement at university level. Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22(3), 175-196. https://doi.org/10.24193/cbb.2018.22.12
Pluck, G. (2015a). The 'street children' of Latin America. The Psychologist, 28(1), 20-23. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/january-2015/street-children-latin-america
Pluck, G. (2015b). Challenges and strengths, thinking about´ street children´. Favelas@LSE. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63058/1/Challenges%20and%20strengths%2C%20thinking%20about%20%C2%B4street%20children%C2%B4%20_%20Favelas%20at%20LSE.pdf
Pluck, G., Almeida-Meza, P., Gonzales-Lorza, A., Muñoz-Ycaza, R., & Trueba, A. (2017). Estimación de la función cognitiva premorbida con el Test de Acentuación de Palabras. Revista Ecuatoriana de Neurología, 26(3), 226-234. http://scielo.senescyt.gob.ec/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2631-25812017000200226
Pluck, G., Amraoui, D., & Fornell-Villalobos, I. (2019, in press). Brief Communication: Reliability of the D-KEFS Tower Test in samples of children and adolescents in Ecuador. Applied Neuropsychology: Child. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622965.2019.1629922
Pluck, G., Barajas, B. M., Hernandez-Rodriguez, J. L., Martínez, M. A. (in press). Language ability and adult homelessness. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12521
Pluck, G., Bravo Mancero,P., Maldonado Gavilanez, C. E. Urquizo Alcívar, A .M., Ortíz Encalada, P. A.,Tello Carrasco, E. …Trueba, A. F. (2019). Modulation of striatum based non-declarative and medial temporal lobe based declarative memory predicts academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 14, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2018.11.002
Pluck, G., Bravo Mancero, P., Ortíz Encalada, P.A., Urquizo Alcívar, A. M., Maldonado Gavilanez, C. E., & Chacon, P. (2020). Differential associations of neurobehavioral traits and cognitive ability to academic achievement in higher education. Trends in Neuroscience and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2019.100124
Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., Ricaurte-Diaz, S., & Borja-Alvarez, T. (2015). 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-014-9523-0
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(4), 510-523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2017.1294150
Pluck, G., Crespo-Andrade, C., Parreño, P, Haro, K. I., Martínez, M. A. & Pontón, S. C. (in press). Executive functions and intelligent goal-directed behavior: A neuropsychological approach to understanding success using professional sales as a real-life measure. Psychology & Neuroscience. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pne0000195
Pluck, G. & López-Águila, M. A. (2019). Induction of fear but no effects on cognitive fluency by theta frequency auditory binaural beat stimulation. Psychology & Neuroscience 12(1), 53-64. https://doi.org/10.1037/pne0000166
Pluck, G., Ruales-Chieruzzi, C. B., Paucar-Guerra, E. J., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., & Trueba, A. F. (2016). Separate contributions of general intelligence and right prefrontal neurocognitive functions to academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 5(4), 178-185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2016.07.002
Pluck, G., Villagomez-Pacheco, D., Karolys, M. I., Montaño-Córdova, M. E. & Almeida-Meza, P. (2019). Response suppression, strategy application, and working memory in the prediction of academic performance and classroom misbehavior: A neuropsychological approach. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 17, 100121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2019.100121
