Neurobehavioral Plasticity

Learning, Development, and Response to Brain Insults

Norman E. Spear, Linda P. Spear, Michael L. Woodruff

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134780853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This book describes a unique combination of research programs based on a striking variety of hypotheses and procedures directed toward understanding the sources and consequences of neurobehavioral plasticity. This remarkable attribute of the nervous system -- to be pliable and capable of being shaped or formed by natural or artificial sources toward adaptation or maladaptation -- is considered in terms of the neurochemical forces and neuroanatomical structure that has been found to be pivotal for this function. The impetus for this volume was a symposium held to honor Robert L. Isaacson for his scientific and pedagogical achievements as well as his contributions to behavioral neuroscience. Corresponding to his three major research interests, the book is divided into three sections as follows:
* the first explores the relationship between the limbic system and behavior, with an emphasis on learning and memory;
* the second considers -- through a wide range of approaches -- issues of plasticity in behavior and brain; and
* the third deals with neural and chemical determinants of normal and abnormal behavior. This volume is not only a fitting tribute to Isaacson, but also an unusual collection of new evidence, procedures, and theories destined to have significant influence on behavioral neuroscience.

1

Yerkes Primate Research Center: A Historical Perspective

Frederick A. King
Cathy J. Yarbrough
Emory University

Research with animals has brought immense medical and psychological benefits to humankind that otherwise would never have occurred. The development of vaccines, modern surgical and transplant procedures, testing of new medications, drugs, and medical devices, behavioral methods such as biofeedback, programmed learning, and behavioral modifications all had their roots in animal research, along with the development of dozens of new diagnostic and analytical tools. There is no question that further advances will continue to require animals for the indefinite future.

Intact living animals, along with humans, today provide the only way that we can study the interactions of organs, systems, and interactive processes, behavioral and biological, in the intact organism. Alternatives developed by scientists, such as microbial, cell, and tissue cultures, and mathematical and computer models of biological and behavioral activities and interactions, are important adjunct methods, but they cannot replace whole animals for the study of normal physiological and psychological processes that affect the whole individual.

The need for continued research with whole live, behaving animals is as great in behavioral research as it is in biomedical studies. For example, although certain aspects of the toxicity of drugs used to treat mental illness may be tested in cell or tissue culture, we are unlikely to elicit a full understanding of their behavioral and biological side effects until we have tested them in animals with intact or, in certain instances, abnormal brains. Further, in order to discover whether a particular drug will have a favorable effect on depression, for example, it may be necessary to use behavioral methods to produce a state of depression in animals; in the process of evaluating the efficacy of drugs, we have the opportunity to recognize undesirable side effects as well. Either we do this in animals, or we test the drug on human patients, or both.

Because the priorities and concerns for most of us are for humans over animals, it is sensible that the drugs having behavioral effects be tested in animals before they are administered, even on an investigational basis, to either normal or disturbed humans. The drugs that have brought or kept millions of psychiatric patients out of the fearsome psychological conditions of the back wards of asylums were tested first in animals. These psychotropic drugs include the major and minor tranquilizers and mood elevators. As for the so-called alternatives, we have not yet seen depression, anxiety, or behavioral hyperexcitability in a dish of cells in the laboratory, and we likely never will.

However, a very vocal, well-organized and well-financed minority is trying to convince the public, media, and our legislators that the so-called alternatives can replace animals in research today and that animal research has not contributed to medicine and psychology. Animal rightists also contend that research animals are treated cruelly. The movement is not new. It began in Victorian England and through the years has had sputters of activity. Dr. Robert Means Yerkes, who in 1930 founded the institute that today has become the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University, had to contend with these antiscience individuals and groups (R. Y. Blanshard, personal communication, Oct. 17, 1994), just as I and other scientists must today.

YERKES CENTER BEGINS WITH A DREAM

In 1990, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University celebrated its 60th year as a scientific institute dedicated to the improvement of human health and well-being through biological, biomedical, and behavioral research with primates. Throughout the years, the Yerkes Center has also contributed significantly to veterinary improvements and the conservation of endangered primate species, particularly the great apes.

The Yerkes Center is markedly different from the facility that Dr. Robert Means Yerkes established in 1930 under Yale University in a rural location in Florida. Today the center, which has been part of Emory University since 1956 and located in Atlanta since 1965, has two major research sites in the metropolitan Atlanta area; scientific collaborations with over 20 institutions throughout the world; a scientific faculty of over 150 researchers, including 22 core scientists and 80 others based at Emory’s School of Medicine and College of Arts and Sciences; and a primate collection of over 3,000 animals representing 15 primate species including the four varieties of great apes.

In 1930, the Yerkes Center began with four scientists and 33 chimpanzees in Orange Park, Florida. Even this modest beginning was a dream fulfilled for Dr. Yerkes, whose theories and research would form and shape the science of primatology in this country and much of the world.

Dr. Yerkes was a 54-year-old distinguished Professor of Psychobiology at Yale University when he established the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, as the center was known in its early years.

Although the center was established in 1930, Dr. Yerkes’ ideas and design for a primate research institute actually originated as early as 1900, while he was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University (Yerkes, 1943). As Leonard Carmichael (1968), President of the National Geographic Society, recalled in 1968, “It suddenly became clear to (Yerkes) that what was needed to unlock the complex problems of human and animal behavior was a research institute for the comparative study of mammals and man, with special reference to the study of the great apes” (p. 2).

Dr. Yerkes, a true psychobiologist, regarded the study of behavior as a source of information about intelligence and conscious processes and a tool for the comparison of these processes across species. He reasoned that primates, because of their evolutionary closeness to humans, were the species whose behavior could shed most light upon the roots of human behavior, both social and cognitive (Yerkes, 1916, 1943).

Through his establishment of the Orange Park laboratories, Dr. Yerkes set in motion the scientific studies that provided reliable, systematic, and detailed descriptions that he had called for as a young scientist. As a result, Dr. Yerkes stands as the founder of comparative behavioral studies with apes throughout the world (Bourne, 1971; Dewsbury, 1984).

DR. YERKES ADVOCATES MEDICAL AS WELL AS BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH WITH PRIMATES

Not as well recognized was Dr. Yerkes’ strong support and advocacy of medical research with chimpanzees and other primates.

In 1916, Dr. Yerkes wrote in Science, “I am wholly convinced … that the various medical sciences and the medical practice have vastly more to gain than … medical experts (can) imagine, from the persistent and ingenious use of the monkeys and anthropoid apes in experimental inquiry” (p. 7). He was convinced that primate research was a logical and entirely practical shortcut to human biology. In his Science article, he also called for the systematic study of the “fundamental instincts” and the “social relations” of primates as clues to human drives and the origins of complex behaviors (pp. 3, 7).

Yerkes was a visionary with regard to the important uses that chimpanzees and the other primates would eventually be put in the interests of medicine and psychology.

Dr. Yerkes’ comments in Science, which turned out to be so accurate, were based on limited experience with apes or monkeys, because in the early 1900s few scientists had the opportunity to observe primates in zoos, much less in laboratories or in their natural habitat. In 1925, Dr. Yerkes wrote that primates in captivity were found primarily on the stage and in museums and zoos: “But there is now a growing interest in biological problems which the primates may help solve. Consequently in the future, we may come to regard them rather as valuable objects of scientific study than as pets, curiosities, or inventions of the devil” (p. 29).

Even observations of primates in their natural habitat provided limited information to scientists in the early 1900s. In 1925, Dr. Yerkes wrote, “There are thousands of pages descriptive of the life and habits of monkeys and apes and yet for not a single species of primate is our knowledge of innate and acquired behavior … temperament and emotional expressions, social life, relations to environment and life history even approximately complete. Where we most need reliable, systematic, detailed descriptions, we find observational fragments cemented together with guesses, some shrewd, some ridiculous” (p. 263).

Dr. Yerkes’ career as this nation’s first primatologist was preceded by many years of noteworthy accomplishments in the behavioral study of humans and nonprimate animals. His early career as a psychologist and his leadership were recognized by appointments in the first decades of the 1900s to chairmanships of several National Research Council committees and, in 1916, by his election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association while still an assistant professor at Harvard (Boring, 1956).

During the first 15 years of his career (1899–1914), Dr. Yerkes’ behavioral studies focused on the phylogenetic orders of the earthworm, green crab, and crawfish among the invertebrates, and the green frog, speckled turtle, dancing mouse, and pig in the vertebrates (Boring, 1956). He received his doctorate in psychology at Harvard in 1902 with a dissertation on the jellyfish’s reaction to light. Three years later, he helped establish the first American laboratory for comparative psychology. The laboratory was located in Emerson Hall at Harvard, where Dr. Yerkes devoted much effort to the development of standardized measures and procedures for psychobiological studies.

For example, in 1911, with the founder of the school of behavioristic psychology, Dr. J. B. Watson, he devised a multiple-choice apparatus that he would use in his first study of primates. This occurred when Dr. Yerkes spent his sabbatical leave from Harvard University at the Montecito, California, home of a wealthy family with a private menagerie that included an orangutan and 10 monkeys. One of Dr. Yerkes’ former students, Dr. G. V. Hamilton, was psychiatrist to a member of the family (Boring, 1956; Bourne, 1971; Dewsbury, 1984). Dr. Hamilton “had the novel idea of using monkeys to illuminate problems of human behavior,” Dr. Yerkes recalled in 1943 (p. 293).

After conducting his pioneering studies on ideational behavior and behavioral adaptivity with the primates at Montecito, Dr. Yerkes returned to Harvard. But in 1917, he left Harvard to chair the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota because he regarded that university as more receptive to his ideas for a primate research institute. However, his plans were curtailed when the United States entered World War I and he moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the Army’s Medical Department with the rank of major and eventually colonel. Assigned to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, Dr. Yerkes developed the program that tested 2 million young military recruits to provide a basis for their proper assignment for training and effective service (Boring, 1956; Yerkes, 1943).

CHIM AND PANZEE—DR. YERKES’ FIRST CHIMPANZEES

In 1923, while still in government service in Washington, D.C., Dr. Yerkes acquired his first chimpanzees, a young pair that had been imported into this country for purchase by a zoo. Dr. Yerkes learned about the animals, which were living at the New York Zoological Park until the importer could sell them. He spent his family’s savings of $2,000 to purchase the chimpanzees, whom he named Chim and Panzee. They lived primarily at the Yerkes family’s New Hampshire farm.

The $2,000 investment paid off. Dr. Yerkes’ studies of Chim and Panzee provided the scientific evidence that the apes in many respects were Almost Human, as he titled his first book, published in 1924, also the year he joined Yale. Importantly, the results of his observations of the behavior of Chim, Panzee, and the few other apes (including the circus gorilla Congo) that he was able to study during the 1920s persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and Yale University to provide funds for the establishment of this nation’s first primate research institute.

Dr. Yerkes selected Florida for the site of the institute because its climate approximated tropical Africa where he had visited in the late 1920s as part of his meticulous planning for the center. Dr. Yerkes did not know then that primates thrived in less tropical environments if adequate, heated facilities were available during cold weather. However, he was concerned about the health and well-being of his apes. Indeed, his Orange Park institute generated basic information about primate husbandry that improved the care of captive primates everywhere (Bourne, 1971; Yerkes, 1943). In 1925, Dr. Yerkes decried “zoological parks, where conditions are supposed to be on the whole very good for the life of captive animals, [where] the life span of the orangutan and chimpanzee has been measured in months instead of in years as of course it should be.” For the gorilla, the situation was worse. He wrote, “the captive life of the gorillas has been measured in days” (Yerkes, 1925, p. 223).

The chimpanzee colony assembled in Orange Park in 1930 included four animals that Dr. Yerkes had in New Haven; 13 chimpanzees that were donated by the estate of Mrs. Rosalie Abreu, who had a private zoo in Cuba and who greatly admired Dr. Yerkes; and 16 chimpanzees that were a gift from the Pasteur Institute in France, which had facilities in Africa. Because the original colony included adults as well as juveniles, Dr. Yerkes and his colleagues in Orange Park did not have to wait to begin studies of reproduction. In 1930, the first chimpanzee birth occurred in Orange Park. The birth of Alpha, as the first offspring was named, provided Dr. Yerkes and his colleagues with the first detailed observations of the chimpanzees’ reproductive process (Bourne, 1971; Yerkes, 1943). Through subsequent births, the Yerkes colony of chimpanzees has grown to over 200 including several in their 40s and 50s. Alpha died in 1966, at the age of 36. Two years ago, Gamma, the last remaining chimpanzee in our colony who was studied by Dr. Yerkes, died at the age of 59. Gamma was the oldest chimpanzee on record.

The Orange Park laboratories attracted a small cadre of talented young scientists, including Drs. Henry W. Nissen, H. C. Bingham, Austin Riesen, Winthrop Kellog, Caryle Jacobsen, and John F. Fulton (Bourne, 1971). Dr. Nissen (1931), who became the third Director of the laboratories, was the first scientist to study apes in Africa, where Dr. Yerkes had planned to establish a field station to “supplement and safeguard the study of captive specimens, and thus afford opportunity to check and correct the interpretation of experiments and the conclusions based upon them” (p. 296). World War II curtailed those plans (Yerkes, 1943).

In 1931, 2 years after returning from Africa, Dr. Nissen began a long-term study on the physical and behavioral development of chimpanzees that would significantly improve scientific understanding of these apes (Bourne, 1971; Nissen & Yerkes, 1943; Yerkes, 1943).

Scientific knowledge about the apes also was advanced by the battery of tests developed by the Orange Park researchers to systematically study various aspects of the chimpanzees mentality, including visual and auditory acuity, visual contrast, strength, reaction time, avoidance re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Yerkes Primate Research Center: A Historical Perspective
• I Limbic System and Behavior
• II Plasticity in Behavior and Brain
• III Neural and Chemical Determinants of Normal and Abnormal Behavior
• Author Index
• Subject Index