Dr Brent Alsop teaches at both 100 and 400 level. He grew up in rural Northland outside Whangarei, where he went to high school. He then spent a year as an exchange student in the USA, where the more liberal curriculum enabled him to study both psychology and computer programming at a time when this was rare in high schools in New Zealand.
He attended the University of Auckland with the goal of becoming a clinical psychologist but, while earning a BSc in Psychology, found the clinical papers not to his liking. By the third year of the course he had begun to look for another avenue. Chance pointed him in the direction he would finally take. In one of his third year classes it was his turn to run the animals, which required the use of a computer. This was in the days when computers had to be ‘booted up’ by toggling a series of switches in a set sequence, and so the computer in question was only started up by the Professor.
As time passed by and the professor had not arrived, Brent became more and more concerned, eventually pulling out the handbook for the computer and opening it up himself, over the warnings from the other students that no one was allowed to do this. The professor, who it afterwards emerged had had a breakdown on the motorway, was intrigued that he had booted up the machine correctly and questioned him about his past experience.
When he found Brent had some programming ability, he offered him a summer job. Brent enjoyed this so much that he went on to do a Masters in Psychology that merged into a Ph.D. in Signal Detection Theory. This is mainly about decision making in times of uncertainty. Much of his work involved visual stimuli in pigeons, with a particular interest in the consequences of different decisions on subsequent behaviour using mathematical modelling in addition to the experimentation.
One result of the work was the publication of a number of papers, and a very important aspect of the whole experience was having an interested and active supervisor in a happy and productive lab - things to be very aware of if you are looking for a place to gain a postgraduate degree.
Having enjoyed the research, as well as the element of teaching involved as postgraduate student, he decided to try for an academic career by writing to 25 academic establishments in Canada and the US, finally taking a well-funded offer from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia at. Brent stressed the benefits of post-doctoral fellowships - a stepping stone between finishing a Ph.D and obtaining a university teaching post - in broadening one’s experience and skill-set.
On to Otago University for another post-doc post running the Head of Departments lab at a time when the University was involved in the expansion of the department. Soon after a job came up for which he successfully applied. In one of the strange turns of events quite commonly encountered in the academic world, having rejected clinical psychology as a career, he found himself teaching applied behavioural analysis to clinical psychology students, as well as designing computer tasks for people with ADHD which measure the response of the children to rewards and punishments.
Touching on the possible role of dopamine in ADHD as well as a rat model for the condition, Brent described the work he is involved with in Okinawa, Japan, an island with a large number of American families at the military bases there. One advantage of the military personnel is that it keeps bringing in fresh supplies of participants for the study! The materials developed with experience too, as the early designs of button boxes and joysticks used in the computer tasks proved insufficient to withstand the banging they received from enthusiastic children.
In reply to questions, Brent noted that the Japanese children used as controls at one point were far less influenced by “punishment” in the exercises, with the possibility that this might illustrate a cultural difference. Commenting on the possible over-diagnosis of ADHD, he described the quite lengthy and expensive process they go through to arrive at a diagnosis, as opposed to the less rigorous methods that - certainly a few years ago - might produce this diagnosis. He also noted that Canadian universities are more similar to New Zealand Universities than are European ones, except that they talk a lot about ice hockey rather than rugby!
