SABA Experimental Fellowship Recipients
2008: Carla Lagorio, University of Florida
Originally from Wisconsin, Carla Lagorio received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire with a major in Psychology and an emphasis in Behavior Analysis. While in Eau Claire, Carla worked closely with Dr. Gregory Madden where they pursued empirical questions involving self-control, risky choice, and temporal discounting. These studies were conducted with humans, pigeons, and rats, providing Carla with exposure to differing research environments, bodies of literature, research questions, and experimental and quantitative techniques.
One of Carla’s primary research interests has been examining behavior in a comparative context, assessing similarities and differences across humans and other animals. This interest has been developed further in Dr. Timothy Hackenberg’s laboratory at the University of Florida, where Carla is completing her graduate work. In her first experiment along these lines, they studied risky choice – choices between fixed (certain) and variable (uncertain) delays to reinforcer delivery – in both humans and pigeons under closely analogous experimental conditions. The aim was to better align the methodologies used with different species to enable them to distinguish genuine species differences from differences in procedure. To that end, a token-reinforcement system was used with both species, in which arbitrary stimuli were earned and later exchanged for consumable-type reinforcers: food for pigeons and video segments from favorite TV programs for humans. Results were roughly similar across species and indicated that when procedural differences were minimized, performances across species were brought into greater accord. These data, and this type of comparative analysis in general, provide important information about the continuity of choice patterns across species, and on the degree to which principles discovered in the animal laboratory can be extended to more complex human activity.
A related line of research that Carla hopes to pursue during her graduate career involves what is termed prospect theory: examining behavior when choices are made between gains and losses of differing probabilities. Carla is also currently exploring risky choice in a token-reinforcement context as an experimental analogue of gambling. Conceptualizing gambling as choice behavior has many advantages, including precise measurement of behavior in relation to known reinforcement variables, and quantification of behavior in relation to well-established models (such as unit price, matching, and optimization). Upon completion of her Ph.D., Carla hopes to pursue a faculty position where she can continue conducting research in behavior analysis.
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