Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Neil Dugdale
Senior Lecturer
Neil’s main research interests are in the learning and development of language, and the effects of language on cognition and behaviour.
About
Neil’s main research interests are in the learning and development of language, and the effects of language on cognition and behaviour.
Neil’s main research interests are in the learning and development of language, and the effects of language on cognition and behaviour.
Neil’s interest in psychology began when his elder sister brought home textbooks for the night-school course she was taking with her friends as a social activity. These texts distracted Neil so much from the A-levels he was taking at the time in chemistry and maths that he had to resit them. However, the up-side was that he now knew what he wanted to pursue as a career. He went on to study Psychology at Bangor University where he earned a First class honours degree and a PhD. Part of his doctoral research came from studying the learning abilities of language-trained chimpanzees while employed for a year as a research co-ordinator in Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh's lab in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon completing his PhD, Neil became a psychology lecturer at Bangor where he specialised in the topics of learning and language, became Director of Undergraduate Studies for 8 years, and co-founded and directed the School-run daycare nursery and centre for developmental research. He served there for over 20 years, before taking up his current post at Leeds Beckett in 2014.
Research interests
Neil’s main research interests are in the learning and development of language, and the effects of language on cognition and behaviour. At the heart of the research he conducts are questions such as ‘What is distinctive about language that gives it the power to transform so many aspects of our psychological functioning, such as our learning, memory, thinking, mental health and personality?’ More specifically, he has been at the forefront of adapting behaviour-analytic tests of ‘stimulus equivalence’ to investigate the processes that underlie children’s rapid acquisition of the receptive and productive symbolic vocabularies that are so crucial to their later intelligence, reading ability, syntactic and semantic development, and school success.
Publications (3)
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Naming, stimulus equivalence and conditioned hearing
1996
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior65(1):272-274 Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Inc.
Unreinforced Conditional Selection by Two-Year-Olds in A Six-Comparison Matching Task
April 2002
The Psychological Record52(2):159-172 Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Dugdale N, Johnson SFour normally developing 2-year-old children were exposed to a story in which six novel characters appeared and were named. To assess learning of the character name → picture relations, all six pictures were presented together as comparisons in matching-to-sample test trials and the children were asked to make selections as each of the six names were dictated as samples. No child learned any of the target relations, but 2 made unreinforced conditional selections (URCSs) to some of the sample names (i.e., made their own one-to-one assignments of sample names to comparison pictures). This was the first time URCS had been demonstrated on an auditory-visual matching task, on any matching task with more than three comparisons, and with children so young. The long-term retention of a specific pattern of URCS was also shown for the first time, with 1 child maintaining his sample-comparison assignments across a 43-day gap in testing. The findings highlight the potential threat of URCS-based false-positives on tests of young children's emergent matching-to-sample (e.g., in tests of stimulus equivalence or ostensive learning).
TESTING FOR SYMMETRY IN THE CONDITIONAL DISCRIMINATIONS OF LANGUAGE‐TRAINED CHIMPANZEES
January 2000
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior73(1):5-22 Wiley
Dugdale N, Lowe CFIf subjects are taught to match Stimulus A to B and then, without further training, match B to A, they have passed a test of symmetry. It has been suggested that nonhumans' lack of success on symmetry tests might be overcome by giving them a history of symmetry exemplar training, that is, by directly teaching a large number of conditional relations (e.g., AB, CD, EF, …) and also directly training the “reverse” of these relations (e.g., BA, DC, FE, …). The chimpanzee subjects of the present study, Sherman, Austin, and Lana, had already received extensive symmetry exemplar training as a result of attempts to teach a selection‐based language system of lexigrams. The present study systematically subjected 2 of these chimps (Sherman and Lana), for the first time, to standard symmetry tests in controlled conditions. Both chimps failed the tests, even when their correct responses on test trials were reinforced. The findings do not support the exemplar training hypothesis, and cast doubt upon whether the chimps can pass tests of stimulus equivalence.
