I met with Stephen Lea to interview him about the Special Issue in his honor in the Psychonomic Society journal Learning & Behavior. The interview episode has two parts and could have had so many more. He has a fascinating career and is very interesting. The beginning of the episode features a brief interview with Lisa Leaver, Lea’s colleague, and co-Guest Editor of the Issue.
Transcription
Intro
Persaud: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.
Now, here is your host, Laura Mickes.
Interview with co-Guest Editor Lisa Leaver
Mickes: I’m speaking with Lisa leaver about being a guest editor for the special issue of the Psychonomic Society journal Learning and Behavior. The special issue is in honor of Stephen Lea whose interview is a little bit later in this episode. Lisa, thanks for agreeing to talk with me.
Leaver: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Mickes: How did the editorship come about?
Leaver: Anna [Wilkinson] is a member of the Comparative Cognition Society, so she had initially agreed to edit the Special Edition and she asked if I would help and be a co-Editor, and I was thrilled to do that because Stephen has been a mentor to me for the past nearly 20 years, and so it was a real honor to be asked to be able to do something to celebrate his career.
Mickes: How did you meet each other?
Leaver: I was hired partly by Stephen about 20 years ago as a lecturer here at the university fresh out of my PhD, that doesn’t really happen anymore, to cover his teaching when he took on the role of Deputy Vice Chancellor, and I’ve been here ever since.
Mickes: You are… Well, I guess you’re probably both lucky, but I had the honor of interviewing him and meeting him for the first time and he’s just really knowledgeable and seems like such a great guy. So, to have such a great colleague,
Leaver: He’s a really generous, brilliant man.
Mickes: I could have talked to him forever, so I think I’m a little jealous of you. While we’re singing his praises, what do you think his most important contribution to the field is?
Leaver: Oh, that is a really difficult question to answer. Stephen has contributed so much to the field. He’s probably most well known for his work on concept formation, which formed the foundation of his career right through from his PhD. He has done an awful lot of really important work there. He’s done stuff on economics in humans. He’s done a lot on seabirds, diving seabirds.
Mickes: What?! [Apologies for the high pitched squeak.]
Leaver: He just, he’s involved in so many different things. He’s a proper real sort of old fashioned gentleman. He’s interested in everything in he’s curious about everything and he’s keen to be involved.
Mickes: That’s great.
Stephen gave a Master Lecture at the Comparative Cognition Conference. Was that well received and a lot of people in attendance?
Leaver: I think everyone at the conference attends the master lectures as a general rule and Stephen was exactly the same. It was really well attended. The room was packed and it was really well received.
I think the Stephen broke the mold a little bit. I haven’t been to too many Comparative Cognition Society meetings, but the standard talk that I have seen at the master lecture tends to be a bit of a, a rehash of everything that that particular person has done in their career. So Stephen did a little bit of that. He gave a little bit of an overview, but then he spent the majority of the master lecture presenting a new model that him and some colleagues and including me have come up with about behavioral flexibility. And so he presented quite a lot of new ideas as well, which was great.
Mickes: Did you enjoy being a guest editor for the Special Issue?
Leaver: I really did. I haven’t got a lot of experience editing. And it was quite daunting because it papers were coming from so many different areas of fields that were influenced by Stephen. So it wasn’t necessarily completely in my area of expertise, but it was really interesting. There were a lot of people involved that I have worked with in the past that I’ve known in the past, previous PhD students of Stephen’s as well. So it was really nice to be involved in that and to see it come together and really interesting to see the diversity of work that you influenced.
Interview with Stephen Lea
Mickes: I’m so excited that I get to meet and interview a legend in psychological science, Professor Stephen Lea. Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed, Stephen.
Lea: Pleasure.
Mickes: All right, so we’re here because there was a Special Issue March 2020 in the Psychonomic Society journal Learning & Behavior and the issue is in honor of your work and the influence that it had on the field. What was your response when you learned about that?
Lea: Well, the Special Issue is a consequence of something else. The Comparative Cognition Conference, always known as COO3, which is held every year in Florida in the spring, always features what’s called a master lecture. And this is an hour-long lecture given by someone who’s been active in the field for a long time. And it’s a real privilege to be allowed to speak to COO3 for an hour because normally speaking, the maximum slot you’re allowed is 10 minutes.
Mickes: So you got an extra 50.
Lea: Yeah, that’s a, it’s a really serious, uh, advantage.
Mickes: Well, wait a minute. I found on YouTube that video is an hour and 11 minutes or so.
Lea: Uh, well, I always take a bit more than I’m offered.
Mickes: [Laughs] Nice.
Lea: And that is then followed up, or has been for a good number of years now, with a Special Issue of a journal which features a paper that’s based more or less closely on the lecture and then other papers by people who are involved in similar sort of work to the person who’s given the master lecture.
And when they asked me if I would do the master lecture the following year, I was a) extremely pleased and b) extremely flattered because this, as I say, is the comparative cognition conference. And although in many ways comparative cognition was my first love as a researcher and has been the most consistent theme in my research work, I certainly have not devoted all my efforts to it. I’m a butterfly. I’ve done bits of this and bits of that within the animal field. I’ve also worked in behavioral ecology, but I also have a completely different strand of research in economic psychology.
Mickes: So to bring it back to the special issue, you wrote a paper for the issue called “Behavioral flexibility: a review, a model, and some exploratory tests.” And so my first inclination was to ask you what is behavioral flexibility? But I started reading your paper and you don’t define it right away. You go through some background first. So do you want to do the same or do you prefer to define what behavioral flexibility is now?
Lea: Well, the trouble with behavioral flexibility as a concept is that different people have used the term in a variety of different ways. So in that paper I was trying to sort through the different ways people have used the term to see if there are common strands to see if we could come at something that would be a workable definition.
But I’m not someone who thinks that you should always start your research with a definition of what you’re looking at. In my view, useful definitions emerge from investigating a topic because actually until we start investigating a topic, we don’t really know what the effective constructs are and uh, it’s a big mistake in my view to prematurely pin down a construct with a rigid definition.
It’s that whole business of cleaving nature at the joints, see what the important constructs are and then give them useful names.
Mickes: You test your model to narrow down the meaning of behavioral flexibility, is that right?
Lea: Well, I filtered through the historical usage of the term behavioral flexibility. And it’s interesting. The first use we could find was actually by a primatologist who’d been working in the context of continental ethology, Lorenz, Tinbergen, people like that. The idea of behavior is very much something fixed and given in a particular species of animal. So if you want to understand behavior, you need to understand the species. And he was, in fact, looking at behavior in troops of monkeys in the field and discovering the different troops behaved in different ways that could only be really understood in terms of the different histories of those troops, the different things that had happened to them, what we would nowadays call animal culture. And so in his paper, he wields the concept of behavioral flexibility to explain why behavior is not bound down by Lorentzian fixed action patterns and innate releasing mechanisms and things of that nature.
Now, of course to someone coming from the other tradition of studying animal behavior; that say psychologist studying animal learning and activity that went on much more in America compared with the ethology. The idea that animals changed their behavior through life is not exactly strange.
Mickes: Right.
Lea: And what learning theorists had to discover in the big collision that occurred between learning theory and ethology started happening in the 1950s was going on vigorously in the sixties and seventies when I was beginning to be a researcher. What learning theorists had to discover was that an awful lot of what animals do is to be explained just by what kind of animal they are.
Lea: And the behavior of a monkey is not the same as the behavior as a rat and that’s because one’s a monkey and the other’s a rat!
Mickes: [Laughs]
Lea: They have different bodies and they have different brains and you need to take those things into account. For people coming out of that psychological background, talking about flexibility as just the capacity to learn in effect makes the term empty because, from a psychological point of view, animals do learn. That’s what they do. That’s why we study them.
Mickes: Right.
Lea: And that’s led people to adopt the term behavioral flexibility for something rather more subtle than the mere ability to learn, particularly in the context of what we tend to call animal problem solving, although nowadays under more ecological influence, we often refer to them as food extraction tasks.
They have a long history in psychology, going back to Thorndike and these cats in puzzle boxes. But the characteristic of these situations is that you take an animal, you don’t try to modify its behavior to show it how to do something totally novel, something it’s never done before.
You face it with a situation where its current repertoire of responses, not going to get it to the food that’s hidden but manifests perhaps by smell or sight in the situation. And you’re looking at how animals come to find a solution in that situation.
Mickes: If they do.
Lea: If they do. Some animals, some problems, no solution ever found. And one of the things you find is that with a given problem, some individuals will solve it much more quickly than others and animals of some species will solve problems much more quickly than others. And one of the concepts that’s been wielded to try and explain these differences is the idea of behavioral flexibility. That maybe some individuals or some species are more flexible than others, more able to change their behavior in response to failure to resolve problem in the situation. And so some of the more modern uses of the term behavioral flexibility reflect that emphasis.
We got into constructing a model to try to find some precision in something that would make a difference to how quickly animals learn. So the model that we constructed was based on an idea of an animal with a given repertoire of behaviors faced with a problem. And some of those behaviors might be successful, others would not. Some might have a high as we would call it, operant level, that say, be likely to occur. Uh, others would not. And some would be easy to learn what to call prepared, and others would not. And we wanted to model a problem-solving situation where there were a large number of possible responses available and then introduce into that an overall parameter that we hoped would correspond to behavioral flexibility.
Mickes: And that’s your U parameter.
Lea: That is the magic parameter U.
Close
Mickes: This episode has two parts. This is the end of Part 1 of my interview with Professor Stephen Lea. Come back to listen to Part 2 to learn about Stephen magical parameter U, Pizza and squirrels, Stephen’s favorite and least favorite animal to work with, and what we’re missing if we only study humans.
Concluding statement
Persaud: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.
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Featured Psychonomic Society articles:
Leaver, L. A., & Wilkinson, A. (2020)A special issue in honour of Stephen Lea – a true comparative psychologist. Learning & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-020-00414-9
Lea, S. E. G., Chow, P. K. Y., Leaver, L. A., & McLaren, I. P. L. (2020). Behavioral flexibility: A review, a model, and some exploratory tests. Learning & Behavior (2020). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-020-00421-w
