For, and against, cultural imperialism in psychology teaching

As a Europe-born professor teaching in a Latin American country I am always at risk of being a twenty-first century cultural imperialist, i.e. forcing my culture onto another. After all, a professor is there to teach, to affect a change in the abilities and behaviour of the students. That is what learning is. The learning itself is desirable of course, but the content of the learning is the crux of the issue. Professors come from specific cultures and have their own blind spots and biases. It is a real risk; one can easily assume that what one is familiar with is the correct way of doing things.

In fact, many psychologists are acutely aware that adaptions need to be made for teaching in different cultures. As a particular example, forms of psychopathology vary across cultures. Simply teaching about DSM disorders in Ecuador, without examining local manifestations of mental illness would be inappropriate. DSM is really only a classification of mental disorders based on signs and symptoms commonly seen in the USA. Much of that will transfer across cultures, but some will not.

However, here I argue that adaption of teaching to different cultures is not necessarily the big issue that some psychologists make it. I am talking here from the perspective of a British psychologist teaching in Ecuador. I teach more or less the same ideas and concepts whatever country I am in. This is not out of laziness; it is out of belief. In this blog post I explain why I believe in a general, global education for psychologists, rather than parochial, local-style psychology, which may appear more culturally appropriate, but ultimately does not serve the students well. These are my reasons:

1. Good psychology is science. Science does not change from culture to culture. The way to advance psychology is to produce and interpret data logically. That’s basically what science is: Sensible, intelligent interpretation of data. It’s a clear way of thinking, not a topic. That way of thinking is the same in Ecuador as it is in my home country (England), or in Kazakhstan, or anywhere. It is my job as an educator to encourage the scientific way of thinking. It is true that there are inter-cultural differences in the matter of psychology, i.e. the mind. For example, there are cognitive processing differences between people in individualist and collectivist cultures. We know this because quantitative, scientific psychologists have done research on it. Good psychology teaching is about teaching good science.

2. Psychology is international. Psychologists move around the world, particularly those from countries such as Ecuador, where postgraduate study opportunities are limited. To continue one’s studies one often has to move to a different country. That’s good. However, if the students only study a version of psychology considered suitable for the Ecuadorian context, then they will be at a disadvantage when they go abroad, and that’s not fair. Good psychology education prepares people to use their training globally. This is particularly important in regards to information literacy and research methodology. Such skills are currently not emphasised in Ecuadorian psychology training. Nevertheless, they are essential for one to succeed in one’s studies in many other countries.

There is admittedly a bias for psychology literature, particularly journal articles, to come from a small number of English-speaking countries. And journal articles are the number one source of information for good psychologists. The way to address that imbalance is for psychologists in countries such as Ecuador to gain the skills to be able to publish their own research. That will ultimately serve Ecuadorian psychology better than making unnecessary distinctions between the local psychology and gringo psychology. Again, this will be achieved by international-standard research skills being emphasized in Ecuador, as they are in the countries publishing most of the research.

3. Universities are special. Whereas most people in their working lives are focused on producing profits for somebody, good professors are in the business of truth (the ultimate goal of research) and forming better people (the ultimate goal of education). That’s the same around the world. I think of universities as being like embassies, they are both insulated to a large extent from the environments that they are physically located in. There are ways of doing things, in universities or in embassies, which are the same wherever you are, in Quito, Washington or Moscow. In academia at least, these are generally virtuous ways of doing things. For example, attitudes to cheating may vary between cultures, but there is a common belief amongst university-people that one should not present as one’s own, work that was produced by another, i.e. plagiarism. Students may have to learn that, but that is part of their education in how to be academic. That special, high-minded feature of universities globally is something that should be celebrated. Adapting academic ways to local cultures risks that specialness of higher education.

4. Much of the ‘Ecuadorian psychology’ that I come across is nothing that needs to be preserved anyway. In fact, it shouldn’t even be taught at universities. If there was a rich cultural tradition of thinking about the mind espoused by modern Ecuadorian psychologists, derived from their history, perhaps of Amerindian origin, then I would be all for teaching that, alongside internationally-accepted psychology material. But the psychologists who resist my teaching of psychology, and suggest that I’m imposing my academic cultural background, are generally involved with highly dubious fields anyway. These include hypnotherapy, dream analysis, graphology, tarot cards, Bach flower remedies, etc. These are all European, nineteenth and twentieth-century pseudosciences. Think about it. The damaging cultural imperialism has already been done. I’m in fact one of the people fighting against it. It is the responsibility of good psychology professors, from whatever background, to train psychologists who can tell the difference between pseudoscience and psychology. That means not only teaching up-to-date and accepted knowledge, but even more importantly, the scientific skills and the information literacy needed to recognize and reject pseudoscience.

Finally, if students are trained well in the core of globally recognised psychology, and have the information literacy and research skills they will become good psychologists. From those foundations they can develop a psychology for Ecuador.

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

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.