Rate My Professor Brent Alsop

Dr Brent Alsop is a researcher and educator in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. He completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology at the University of Auckland, earning his PhD in 1989. He then held a Killam Postdoctoral Scholarship for two years at Dalhousie University in Canada before joining the University of Otago. There, he has amassed over 25 years of research experience and more than 20 years of university teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels.

Dr Alsop's research focuses on the experimental analysis of human and animal behaviour in detection and choice procedures, including behavioural models of choice and signal detection. His studies explore how resource distributions affect choices in financial decisions and foraging, and how rewards and response costs influence judgments of ambiguous stimuli through signal-detection experiments, deriving quantitative models of these processes. Key publications include 'Receiver operating characteristics from non-human animals: Some implications and directions for research with humans' (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1998), 'Signal presentation ratios and reinforcer ratios in signal detection procedures' (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1999, with V. Johnstone), 'Signal-detection analyses of conditional discrimination and delayed matching-to-sample performance' (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1991), 'Is increased sensitivity to punishment a common characteristic of future-oriented adults with ADHD symptoms?' (Journal of Neural Transmission, 2019, with E. Furukawa et al.), 'Disrupted waiting behavior in ADHD: exploring the impact of reward history' (Child Neuropsychology, 2022, with K. Umemoto et al.), and 'Behavioral sensitivity of Japanese children with and without ADHD to reinforcement history' (Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2017, with E. Furukawa et al.). Dr Alsop has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour. He teaches PSYC 111: Biological Bases of Behaviour, PSYC 401: Behaviour Analysis, and PSYC 425: Advanced Topics in Behaviour Analysis.