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| Cluster 3: Evolution & Neuroscience |
| Tuesday, October 29, 2024 |
| 8:10 AM–12:20 PM |
| The Drake Hotel; Lobby Level; Grand Ballroom |
| Area: PCH; Domain: Theory |
| Chair: Timothy D. Hackenberg (Reed College) |
| Discussant: David Wayne Schaal (Accuray, Inc.) |
| CE Instructor: Timothy D. Hackenberg, Ph.D. |
| Abstract: Evolution and Neuroscience |
| Instruction Level: Intermediate |
| Target Audience: Behavior Analysts |
| Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the presentation, participants will be able to: (1) Describe how understanding social life as a perceptual task might change the way we theorize about primate brain evolution and its links to sociality; (2) Describe how an increased focus on reverse-translational assays might accelerate treatment development and the study of evolutionarily relevant cross-species behavior; (3) Discuss the problems associated with the divide between simple motor skills and what are deemed more complex cognitive abilities; (4) Describe how ways in which complex behaviors can be built up of simpler components. |
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| What You See is What You Get: Embodiment, Action and the Evolution of Primate Brains |
| LOUISE BARRETT (University of Lethbridge) |
| Abstract: Primate social life is often deemed to be complex, requiring inferences about (allegedly) unobservable phenomena, like mental states and social bonds, in order to render it intelligible, along with the navigation of a complex web of emergent, often unpredictable, outcomes. But what if social life is just really very complicated, rather than complex? That is, there is a lot going on, everywhere, all at once, but all can be readily observed and inference is unnecessary. Understanding social life then becomes a perceptual, not conceptual, task. If we adopt such a view, how does this change our theorising about primate brain evolution, and its links to sociality? Here, I suggest if we recognize that a more affordance-driven form of perceptual learning is what enables animals to navigate their environments successfully, and understand that the role of the brain, first and foremost, is to control action in an unpredictable environment, then we will be able to produce a truly evolutionarily theory of brain evolution, and more accurately align the cognate, but distinct, disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. |
 Louise Barrett is Professor of Psychology, and Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour, Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge. She was educated at University College London, UK, and has a degree in Ecology and a PhD in Biological Anthropology. Her research programme centres on the issue of how ecology shapes patterns of social and cognitive evolution. To this end, she has conducted a number of long-term studies of non-human primates in South Africa. In addition, she also works on culture and biology intersect to influence human behaviour, along with aspects of philosophy of mind and cognition. |
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| Leveraging Evolutionarily Relevant Cross-Species Continuity in Medications Development for Neuropsychiatric Illness: A Reverse-Translational Approach |
| BRIAN D. KANGAS (Harvard Medical School) |
| Abstract: Current treatment strategies for neuropsychiatric conditions, including major depression, are woefully inadequate. Recent estimates indicate that only approximately 30% of those suffering report full recovery from available frontline pharmacotherapeutics. In response to this disheartening state of affairs, highly active research programs have emerged, organized around correcting what they view as a longstanding failure in bidirectional alignment between the human (clinical) and animal (preclinical) laboratories. One promising tactic to accelerate medications development is an increased focus on reverse-translational assays. That is, among aspects of animal behavior thought to reflect elements relevant to the human experience, priority is assigned to tasks developed in the human laboratory that can be transformed for animals with maximal formal and functional similarity. This presentation will summarize the theoretical and methodological arguments in favor of this approach by using perhaps the most instructive example to date – medications development for anhedonia. Indeed, anhedonia, the loss of pleasure from previously reinforcing stimuli, is a prominent behavioral phenotype in virtually every neuropsychiatric condition, including depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders. Unfortunately, despite its transdiagnostic prevalence, there are currently no approved pharmacotherapeutics to treat anhedonia. Recent work has capitalized on established quantitative frameworks from the experimental analysis of behavior, bolstered by advances in electrophysiology, to objectively characterize responsivity to reward in humans, rodents, and monkeys. Subjects make visual discriminations under asymmetric probabilistic conditions such that correct responses to one alternative are rewarded more often (rich) than correct responses to the other (lean). Both healthy humans and animals consistently develop a highly adaptive response bias in favor of the rich alternative. However, patients with neuropsychiatric disorders often exhibit blunted response biases, which correlate with current, and predict future, anhedonia. Likewise, animals exposed to chronic stress or early-life adversity have also shown blunted response biases. Importantly, concordance among species in electrophysiological outcomes and pharmacological treatment with drugs known to enhance hedonic tone are commonly observed. Taken together, this quantitative framework offers a highly translational approach to accelerate treatment development for disorders involving anhedonia and, more generally, typifies the promise of reverse-translational endeavors via realignment in the study of evolutionarily relevant cross-species behavior. |
 Dr. Brian Kangas is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Lab Director in the Behavioral Biology Program at McLean Hospital. He received his bachelor's degree in psychology at Southern Illinois University, his master's degree in behavior analysis at the University of North Texas, and his doctorate in psychology at the University of Florida. He focuses on the development and empirical validation of animal models and apparatus designed to assay complex behavioral processes relevant to addiction, pain perception, chronic stress, and neuropsychiatric disorders. He currently directs a research program focusing on diverse pursuits in behavioral biology funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, biopharmaceutical industry, Department of Defense, and NASA. |
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| The Cognitive-Motor Interface |
| JOHN KRAKAUER (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) |
| Abstract: There has long been a divide between simple motor skills and what are deemed more complex cognitive abilities. Here I will discuss the problems associated with this dichotomy. I will then provide a progression of examples of how behaviors can be built up of explicit cognitive components and implicit control policies. |
 Dr. Krakauer is currently John C. Malone Professor, Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab (www.BLAM-lab.org) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a Visiting Scholar at The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. He is Chief Medical Advisor to MindMaze. His areas of research interest are: (1) Experimental and computational studies of motor control and motor learning in humans (2) Tracking long-term motor skill learning and its relation to higher cognitive processes such as decision-making. (3) Prediction of motor recovery after stroke (4) Mechanisms of spontaneous motor recovery after stroke in humans and in mouse models (5) New neuro-rehabilitation approaches for patients in the first 3 months after stroke.(6) Philosophy of mind, philosophy of neuroscience.
Dr. Krakauer is also co-founder of the company MSquare Health (acquired by MindMaze) and of the creative engineering Hopkins-based project named KATA. KATA and MSquare are both predicated on the idea that animal movement based on real physics is highly pleasurable and that this pleasure is hugely heightened when the animal movement is under the control of our own movements. A simulated dolphin and other cetaceans developed by KATA has led to a therapeutic game that has been interfaced with an exoskeletal robot in a multi-site rehabilitation trial for early stroke recovery, and with motion tracking for cognitive therapy in the normal aged. Dr. Krakauer was profiled in the New Yorker in 2015 and his book, “Broken Movement: The Neurobiology of Motor Recovery after Stroke” was published by the MIT Press in the November 2017. He is slowly working on a new book on the mind and intelligence for Princeton University Press. |
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Perspectives on Behavioral Complexity From Evolution and Neuroscience |
| DAVID SCHAAL (Varian, a Siemens Healthineers Company) |
| Abstract: Dr. Schaal’s presentation will offer: 1) analysis of each contribution to this cluster; 2) consideration of the commonalities and differences represented; and 3) discussion of the implications of these for furthering understanding of behavioral complexity via principles of evolution and neuroscience. |
 David Schaal got a PhD in behavioral pharmacology at the University of Florida and was a post-doctoral fellow in neurobehavioral pharmacology at the University of Minnesota. He served on the faculty of the Department of Psychology of West Virginia University for 11 years before joining the Neurosurgery Department of Stanford University in the cerebrovascular disease laboratory. There he served as Co-Editor of the first Behavioral Neuroscience special issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. At Stanford he worked closely with Dr John Adler, inventor of the CyberKnife Radiosurgery System. This led to opportunities in the radiation oncology industry in Silicon Valley, first at Accuray Incorporated and today at Varian, a Siemens Healthineers Company. Much therapeutic radiation is directed to sites within the brain, so Dr Schaal has maintained his interest and involvement in neuroscience. |
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