Andy Lattal, Ph.D.

In a recent piece, I introduced readers to the pigeon as the subject extraordinaire for laboratory research on basic learning processes. Pigeons are used because of their long lives and their…

At a recent luncheon I found myself in conversation with two interesting entrepreneurs who had, over the past 16 months, created what seemed to be a quite excellent behavior recording/management…

I spent a sabbatical year in Lille, France, a city surrounded by what Colonel John McCrae immortalized as “Flanders Fields.” Some of the most horrific fighting that has ever taken place on…

A listener recently told Ira Glass, host of the NPR show This American Life, that he was told that pigs’ rectums were being sold by packing plants to be used as artificial calamari. The…

Is that how you teach persistence, resilience and grit?  This is another story that just drives me crazy! I have read several articles and blogs about the value in failing. Are they kidding?…

Self-awareness is a topic of great interest in psychology. It’s important in everything from personal health care to problem solving, but one of its most important implications is in terms of how we…

I was in Ellicott City, Maryland a while back, visiting my daughter and her family on the night when 21 cars of an 80-car train hauling coal from near my home in West Virginia to Baltimore derailed.…

I am not sure how to introduce the book “Quiet” by Susan Cain. I don’t want to say it is about “introverts” because, as a professional behavior analyst and psychologist, I know the dangers to self…

The 19th century author Rudyard Kipling spoke of meeting triumph and disaster and treating both those imposters just the same. Indeed Kipling’s twin imposters both can result from going with one’s…

Most people probably are familiar with the duck version of the title of this commentary. In 1950, the famous mathematician regarded as the “father of digital computing,” Alan Turing, mused about the…

A story on NPR’s All Things Considered (October 30, 2012) caught my attention. The gist of the story, about supercomputers, was that the 30 billion dollar a year video game industry was driving the…

On a cold winter’s night, or a hot, humid afternoon, nothing is more reassuring than knowing that my handy-dandy automatic thermostat is on the job keeping my house, and me, at a balmy, even, and…

I just read another “drives me crazy” NYT article.  This is not unusual as Times writers often write about behavior, based on the research of business and economics professors.  However,…

We often are reminded that we live in the “information age.” Ours is the period of human history when our decisions are guided by data. Data typically are collected by observation; scientific data…

The year 2013 marked the centennial of the publication of one of psychology’s most important papers. In 1913, John Broaddus Watson wrote “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist” (The…

I wrote this as the Pentagon released its decision to allow women to participate in combat operations, opening a host of new opportunities, and dangers, for half of America’s population. One issue…

So, after his death, it was ‘discovered’ that a superstar of the BBC was a not-so-closeted pedophile for most of his long career. It’s not as if there were not a thousand clues in everything he did…

“Why is the sky blue, Daddy?” How many of us asked our Moms or Dads that one? “Why did she do THAT?” How many times have we asked that question as children AND as adults? Explanation is the Holy…