At the Society for Neuroscience Conference

This week I attended the conference of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington. This is a huge conference, probably the largest neuro- related conference in the world, with around 30,000 attendees every year. The society itself has a membership of about 40,000. Such a large conference and professional organization shows the importance of studies of the brain in modern science. Although it is notable that of the approximately 40,000 members only two are based in Ecuador. We were both there this week.

Many psychologists from around the world were presenting at the conference. Neuroscience and psychological science are two sides of the same coin. You can't really understand the brain without understanding psychology, and vice versa. That's why I was there, not presenting, just for professional development. As a researcher I need to learn of the latest advances as well as widen my understanding in general. As a teacher of psychology, I also need to be constantly updating my knowledge. Ecuador unfortunately has few opportunities for professional development locally, and so it is necessary to attend international events such as this conference in the USA. Keeping up to date with research is particularly important in psychology related to the brain, as it is such a fast-moving field.

The knowledge base of neuropsychology for example has advanced considerably since I was a student in the 90's. I had two very good neuropsychologist teachers, Glyn Humphreys and Jane Riddoch, and I learnt a lot of the latest understanding of the brain from them. But so much has happened since then, the old information is not wrong, but there is so much more detail now. For example, the function of the orbitofrontal cortex has long-been poorly understood. One feature of damage to it, as I learnt as a student, is utilization behavior, the tendency of patients to use objects that are presented to them, even if that use is inappropriate.

This week I watched a presentation by Timothy Behrens (of UCL and Oxford University in the UK) on coding of problem spaces in the orbitofrontal cortex. With magnetoencephalography he has been able to record the different activations in the brain used to solve problems at different stages. And incredibly, they were able to show that when people later rest, their brains run through the same sequence of activations, forward and backwards, over a period of only about 50 milliseconds. This replay phenomenon is likely part of the learning consolidation process. The research is described here just as an example of how rapidly we are increasing our understanding of the psychological processes within the brain.

 

The main lecture hall. Multiple large screens so that thousands of people can see the speaker.

This is the plus side of attending a conference such as Society for Neuroscience. On the other hand, such huge conferences can be overwhelming. With so many presentations it is difficult to choose who to listen to, and as one attendee among 30,000 in a huge conference center there is inevitably a lot of queuing and walking between distant rooms.

For my next conference, I'm planning something smaller and low-key. Jamaica in November 2018 for the Caribbean Psychology Conference.

Neuroeducation

It’s something of an academic fashion at the moment to prefix ‘neuro’ onto other disciplines- neuromarketing, neuromedia studies, neuroeconomics etc. I’m rather dubious about some of these, however one of them does make sense- Neuroeducation. Key topics in neuroscience include learning and memory, language processing, motivation etc., all topics that are relevant to pedagogy. Indeed, a few years ago I took a postgraduate course on Learning and Teaching and was struck by how education as an academic topic was dominated by opinions and hot air, rarely by evidence. So the idea that education specialists are now looking to a true empirical science for guidance is very welcome.

We are doing our part to at the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab to develop this new field and have started our own neuroeducation research program. This is partly in collaboration with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) Masters in Education degree, which focuses on neuroscience and psychology in relation to education. Most of the students on that program are doing their thesis work on neuroeducation topics in the lab. Some of this is on the effects of exercise on symptoms of ADHD in children but also some other projects on socioeconomic effects on the neuropsychological abilities of adolescents.

However our first neuroeducation project started a couple of years ago. The research attempted to find neuropsychological predictors of academic success of undergraduate students. The motivation was the generally very weak relationship between measures of IQ and student performance. Correlations with Grade Point Average (GPA) data tend to be rather meager, with an average of only about r=.2. We hypothesized that tests of ‘frontal lobe’ function, developed in clinical neuropsychology to measure the disruption of behavior following frontal lesions might be better predictors of real life behavior than traditional intelligence tests.

However, there is a problem with that because most tests of frontal lobe function are highly correlated with intelligence tests, and in fact current thinking suggests that a good part of the neurological basis of intelligence is the prefrontal cortex. Nevertheless, not all ‘frontal lobe’ tests are linked to intelligence. Roca et al. in a study of patients with frontal lobe lesions showed that although general intelligence was affected in the patients compared to healthy controls, there were five different ‘frontal lobe’ tests that were impaired independently of the reduced general intelligence (1):

1. The Proverb Test (abstraction)
2. The Faux Pas Test (theory of mind)
3. Hotel Task (multi-tasking)
4. Hayling Test (verbal response suppression)
5. Stop-signal Task (psychomotor inhibition)

We used those five tests, because if they are measuring high level cognition independently of general intelligence, they are ideal candidates to provide an alternative explanation to IQ for why some students excel at university and others don’t. Interestingly the five tests, shown below, seem to measure five quite different general abilities.

The five frontal lobe tests thought to be not linked to general intelligence (1) 

 We administered the five tests plus a standard measure of intelligence, the WAIS-IV, to 64 USFQ students and then looked at which tests best predicated GPA scores. We found that IQ, as expected, was not a great predictor, in fact it predicted only about 12% of the variance in GPA. However, two of the tests that we administered, the Stop-signal Task and the Hayling Test increased the predicative power to about 24%. The important thing is that these two tests are independently associated with GPA, they are explaining some of the variance in GPA not explained by IQ scores. Interestingly, both of these tests are of response inhibition. It seems that as well as being smart, you need to have good behavioral control to get the good grades.

A further interesting observation is that these two tests are both linked to the right lateral prefrontal cortex (2, 3). In contrast, recent neuropsychological studies have suggested that general intelligence is mainly located in the left hemisphere (4). So do we have two parallel and independent contributions to academic success, one intelligence-based in the left hemisphere, and one about behavior control in the right? That’s what our results suggest. Below we can see this idea graphically, where I’ve marked the left-hemisphere areas linked to general intelligence, and the right hemisphere areas linked to response inhibition.

Lateralised regions for response inhibition in the left hemisphere (2,3) and general intelligence in the right hemisphere (4)

That research was published just last week in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education (5). We are now further developing the idea with a study in the workplace, using the same tests. We are interested in whether response inhibition will again emerge as a predictor of workplace success. Or will perhaps one of the other ‘frontal lobe’ tests, such as the Hotel Task, a test of multi-tasking, be better predictors?

1. Roca, M., et al.. (2009). Executive function and fluid intelligence after frontal lobe lesions. Brain, 133(1), 234-247.
2. Aron, A. R., et al.. (2003). Stop-signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans. Nature Neuroscience, 6(2), 115-116.
3. Robinson, G. A, et al.. (2015). Verbal suppression and strategy use: a role for the right lateral prefrontal cortex?. Brain, 138(4), 1084-1096.
4. Barbey, A. K., et al.. (2012). An integrative architecture for general intelligence and executive function revealed by lesion mapping. Brain, 135(4), 1154-1164.
5. Pluck, G. et al.. (2016). Separate contributions of general intelligence and right prefrontal neurocognitive functions to academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 5, 178–185.

New Master's Degree in Psychology

The management here at Universidad San Francisco de Quito have given the go-ahead for us to develop a new master’s degree for training clinical psychologists. It will, without a doubt, be the best clinical psychology training course in Ecuador. The core trainers all have doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from highly respected institutes in the USA. In addition to this we have several full-time psychology professors with research PhDs from top universities in the USA and UK. None of the other universities can muster such academic weight, with most of their professors having only masters’, or lower, degrees. And often those master’s degrees were earned online.

The program will be directed by Dr Richard West. It will follow an evidence-based model with the psychotherapy component focused on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). This makes perfect sense, CBT has much more evidence to support its clinical efficacy than any other psychotherapy.  

Such a course is sorely needed in Ecuador. Due to a lack of appropriate regulation, people with only undergraduate level training can call themselves ‘psychologist’ or even ‘clinical psychologist’. Consequently, there is much quackery passed off as professional practice. The situation is changing though and soon a postgraduate qualification will be needed to use the title ‘psychologist’- hence the new master’s program.

It won’t be ready to go for a while, it still needs to be approved by the national authorities, but it will likely have its first intake in 2016. In addition, a second master’s degree is being planned that will take a more eclectic approach and focus more on sub-clinical clients and counselling skills. That will be directed by Dr Teresa Borja. 

The State of Psychology in Ecuador

Psychology here in Ecuador is a strange thing. Firstly, there is currently very little legal protection over the professional title, anybody with a degree in psychology is a ‘psychologist’. I could legally set up private practice here as a Clinical Neuropsychologist if I wanted to, despite having no clinical training. Indeed there are lots of ‘Clinical Psychologists’ here who have no clinical training. Their titles being based on postgraduate academic qualifications from abroad. Ironically, those who do have clinical training usually only have an undergraduate degree in ‘Clinical Psychology’. So most trained clinical psychologists have no postgraduate qualifications.

There is also a tendency to faddishness. Sub-academic pseudo-psychology is peddled by numerous life coaches, brain trainers, aroma therapists and other cranks. When professional psychology is considered an undergraduate degree, then this is understandable. Many students are just not sufficiently trained to spot pseudoscience. Not surprisingly, what passes as mental health care sometimes borders on superstition and charlatanism. For example, I’ve heard of some ‘clinical psychologists’ using tarot cards as part of their therapy, others horoscopes. Many use hypnotic regressions to ‘past lives’.

How can a country have gotten to a state where graduates (aka Clinical Psychologists) think that tarot and horoscopes are real psychology? One reason is that supernatural beliefs are very common here anyway, so things like tarot are respected by the public and tend to go unchallenged. Another issue is the lack of expertise in Ecuador, there are simply not enough people in the country with doctorate qualifications to staff the universities. Thus, many professors have only masters degrees, and of varying quality at that. Worse, for many years there were few checks on the validity of qualifications, and so there are professors here with PhDs that were bought over the internet. These frauds are the likely source of much of the full-blown mumbo jumbo that passes as psychology. When ‘real’ psychology is taught, it’s frequently based on pop-science paperbacks and TED talks, with little distinction made between entertainment and academia.

Fortunately, the current government is taking steps to improve standards in higher education. For example they are recruiting more experts from abroad and sending Ecuadorian students to top universities in the USA and Europe for postgraduate training (there are very few postgraduate opportunities within Ecuador). The students get their fees paid and generous grants if they agree to return to Ecuador afterwards. The government is also checking all professors’ qualifications and adding the details to an open-access database, so the public can check who really has professional training. In addition, legal steps are being taken to require a postgraduate qualifications for professional psychological practice. With time these steps should improve the current dire situation nationally.

Independent of the government provision, at Universidad San Francisco de Quito we now have the best trained psychology faculty in the country, including several professors with (real) doctorates from respected universities in North America. Some of these are Ecuadorian, some foreigners. We have brought skills in research and clinical work that have generally not been available in Ecuadorian psychology departments before. The potential therefore exists to greatly improve psychology training, and over time, the quality of mental health care provided by the country's next generations of psychologists. 

Quito Brain and Behavior Laboratory

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the inaugural Brain Meeting of the Quito Brain and Behavior lab. The presentation was on neurocognitive function and socioeconomic status. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but it attracted about 20 academics from various fields. That was what we wanted, there are lots of people here who want to do some brain based research, and the monthly Brain Meetings are a way to get them together. Hopefully, this will encourage research and collaborations. The meetings will be held at 4pm every first Tuesday of the month during the teaching semesters.

The advertising poster for the inaugural Brain Meeting of the new lab. 

The Brain Meetings are organized by the Quito Brain and Behavior lab, which is being set up at Universidad San Francisco de Quito by me and Dr. Ana F. Trueba, a psychophysiologist. With her interest and expertise, and my background in neuropsychology and psychopathology, we are forming an international class research group on brain sciences. We both have a lot of experience in running projects, and publishing data in international journals, so forming the lab is helping us to extend this. In addition we have a paid research assistant and several graduate and undergraduate volunteers who are gaining research experience in the lab. Recently an expert in genetics and cognitive neuroscience also joined the group. 

We currently have two projects running, one on predication of academic performance with neuropsychological tests, and the other a validation study on various tests of premorbid function. We are also developing a new battery of cognitive tests that could be used in various clinical studies, for example to measure cognitive decline in dementia. The development of these tests is important because there are currently few assessment tools that are validated for use in Ecuador. By producing our own, we can facilitate future research. We also have studies planned on the role of cortisol and inflammation markers in sub-clinical psychopathology, and some experimental studies of the effects of the hormone and neuromodulator oxytocin. As more collaborators join us, the number and range of projects will increase.

The lab houses a reasonable neuropsychological test library, in fact possibly the biggest in Ecuador. This includes several commercial tests (such as Wechsler tests, Delis Kaplan Executive Function System) as well as many more experimental tests. In addition, we already have some physiological recording equipment, and the university is in the process of buying eye-tracking systems, which will be used in neuromarketing research. So there is plenty of potential. The next Brain Meeting will be held on March 3rd at 4pm at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. 

“Street Children” Research

The concept of ‘street child’ is a difficult one. It includes both homeless children and those who have homes to go to, but spend a lot of time working in urban environments. In fact, it also includes many, many other life contexts. However, it has been a convenient label to describe the poor children often seen unaccompanied in many of the cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia. It’s a term easily understood by the public and hence favored by charities that appeal to the public. However, possibly a more accurate term would simply be urban poor children.

Whether we refer to them as ‘street children’ or simply ‘urban poor children’ is to a large extent a gentile discussion for armchair sociologists. It makes precious little difference to the tens of millions of children worldwide trying to get through their days. Nevertheless, research is needed to inform professionals involved with street children and to combat the abundant stereotypes of street children (generally negative) and present the true situation, regarding the extreme poverty, mental illness, resilience etc. of this significant global demographic.

We have recently published two journal articles on the lives of street children. Most recently a review article in the Psychologist. This examined some of the strengths as well as weaknesses of development associated with street connectedness.

Our recent article in the Psychologist made the front cover. The photo shows a boy who works selling gum to motorists in Quito, Ecuador.  

The other article, published in the InternationalJournal of Mental Health and Addiction describes a study of former street children in Quito. This was research involving three students as research assistants in which we estimated levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We found it to be shockingly high at around 60%. PTSD is not just a mental health concern, it also has significant effects on brain development of children. Thus potentially affecting the course of their whole lives and the success or failure of their struggles with poverty. In fact, we are working on a third journal article looking at the effects of street-connectedness and poverty on neuropsychological development. It appears that, at least in the context of Quito street children, there are particular delays in the development of social cognition skills as measured by Theory of Mind tasks. Such tasks measure the ability to understand the contents of other people's minds. The data seem to suggest therefore that rather than driving specific development, street connectedness in children may delay development of some of the highest cognitive processes.

Many 'street children' are simply working because their families are very poor. Here we see a shoe shine boy working in La Paz, Bolivia

However, on the other hand, studies in Brazil and Bolivia have found the opposite, that street children do indeed develop some skills better than conventionally educated children. This is an interesting and important topic and we intend to continue the line of investigation here in Ecuador. 

Psychology in Suriname

Paramaribo, the capital city of Suriname, has hosted an international psychology conference this week. It has been focused on Caribbean issues, but to some extent this also includes Latin American issues. Although interestingly, Suriname is one of the few places that is in South America, but not Latin America, being mainly Dutch speaking. Although most delegates were from Suriname or Caribbean islands, there were a few international visitors from Europe, the USA, Asia, and me from Ecuador. In fact this was the first presentation credited to the newly formed Quito Brain and Behavior Lab.

The Caribbean Psychology Conference, opening ceremony being blessed by an Amerindian shaman.

I was presenting some of my work on neuropsychological function of 'street children', this is an issue relevant to several Caribbean nations. I've presented my data on PTSD previously (and also it's just been published), but this was the first presentation of the neuropsychological data. It was generally well received with a packed room of 40 delegates to hear my presentation. Although mine was one of only two or three neuropsychological presentations, indeed it was of only a handful that included data, the majority being mainly rhetoric driven. Nevertheless, I met some people doing interesting work and making such connections is the most important aspect of academic conferencing.