Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium will discuss Russ Church’s research contributions and how the panelists have built on them in their own research to determine how to assess individual differences in timing abilities, the effects of environmental and pharmacological manipulations, and the neurobiology of timing.

Basic and translational investigators interested in applying MPR, board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Russell (Russ) Church was a dominant figure in the study of timing processes and how those processes influenced other cognitive processes. During my time as a post-doctoral fellow in his laboratory, Russ and I studied the role of timing processes in classical (Pavlovian) conditioning which led to the development of the Packet theory of timing and conditioning. My laboratory subsequently migrated to studying timing and impulsive choices, but there are multiple areas of our current research program where Russ’ influence is still apparent. This presentation will discuss recent research from my laboratory on the role of temporal attention and other timing processes in impulsive choice procedures in rats. Impulsive choice tasks present choices between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later reward, where the smaller-sooner is the impulsive choice. When rats were required to engage in active (versus passive) timing, they were more self-controlled, showed greater delay sensitivity, and demonstrated stronger preferences for the larger reward (when the delays were the same). The results suggest that tasks that engage temporal attention may be beneficial to reducing impulsive choices. Time-based interventions that involve repeated exposure to delays promoted self-control regardless of temporal attention demands. The interface of timing processes and impulsive choices can provide key insights into understanding the fundamental facets of the timing and decision-making systems.

Russell Church contributed immensely to our understanding of Timing, the ability of animals and humans to discriminate intervals and durations of events. In this talk, I will analyze some of Church’s empirical studies, including his seminal “Bisection of Temporal Intervals”, and his theoretical models, from the influential Scalar Expectancy Theory to the more recent Modular Theory of Timing. I will also explain how Russell Church’s ideas and findings shaped our work on how animals learn to time.

Armando Machado obtained his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Duke University. His research on the conditions in which pigeons generate highly variable, random-like behavior received the Annual Dissertation Award from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association. After his PhD, Armando joined Indiana University as an Assistant and then a tenured Associate professor. In 2000 he moved to the University of Minho where he became Full professor, and in 2019 he moved to the University of Aveiro. Armando’s research focuses on temporal learning, numerical discrimination, choice, and decision making in animals. In 2010 he received the Research Merit Award from the School of Psychology, and in 2014 he received the Scientific Merit Award from the University of Minho. He has served as Editor of the journal Behavior and Philosophy and Associate Editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. He was the President and Program Chair of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior, and the first president of the Portuguese Association of Experimental Psychology.

By 2015, Russ Church decided to write a book that he never got a chance to finish. I was fortunate enough to be his coauthor. Its title—Temporal Conditioning: How Rats Learn—conveyed his view that timing and conditioning should be understood together. But the contents of the book conveyed a way of thinking about research that is so often left out of print. This talk will focus on Russ Church’s evolving views on animal behavior from 2005 to 2015, and where he hoped his ideas would lead. I’ll use this to describe how Russ thought about research—the flow from procedure to psychological model, and from model to evaluation.

David Freestone earned a Ph.D. in Russ Church’s lab in 2012. After a post-doc in neuroeconomics (NYU), he became a professor. His work focused on timing, conditioning, and value-based decision-making. These days, David works as a researcher and data scientist at a virtual eating disorder treatment center, and consults with animal facilities toward building robust data infrastructure to support the welfare of their animals.

In this presentation, I reflect on the impact Russ Church had on me and my research trajectory. I briefly describe my research on basic timing mechanisms. Next, I describe how timing research and immersion in the Church lab impacted my entry into research on memory. Finally, I describe the importance of time in the development of animal models of episodic memory.