Department of Psychology
Douglas Elliffe
Head of Department
Associate Professor
BSc, PhD
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 85262
Email: d.elliffe@auckland.ac.nz
Room: HSB 661 (by appointment only, please see PA in HSB 660)
Office hours: Please email for appointment
Homepage: Experimental Analysis of Behaviour Research Unit
Doug has been at the University of Auckland, as student and staff, since 1979. He was appointed to the academic staff to initiate Psychology at Tamaki in 1992. He has served the University in many different capacities – most notably as Associate Dean of Science (Tamaki); as a member of Animal Ethics Committee and of Education Committee; as Deputy Head and now Head of Psychology; and on a wide range of Departmental, Faculty and University committees and Boards of Studies. Beyond the University, he has recently served on the Marsden Fund panel for Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour; on the Scientific Advisory Panel for the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining; and as Associate Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Doug holds a Distinguished Teaching Award, and teaches Learning and Research Methods in several undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
Doug’s main research interests are in Learning by both animals and humans, or the experimental analysis of behaviour. His particular speciality is experimental analyses of choice, but the range of his recent published work includes analyses of
- how reward frequency and size combine to determine choice,
- how accurately pigeons track changing rates of reward on four different alternatives,
- how humans form classes of equivalent stimuli,
- how rats’ learning and memory abilities change with age,
- whether “conditioned reinforcement” really exists,
- how pigeons’ attention is divided between different dimensions of stimuli,
- how humans’ taste sensitivity changes with repeated testing,
- how diagram fidelity in software design tools affects design productivity, and
- what’s wrong with least-squares linear regression.
His research lab, the EABRU, won the 2009 SABA international award for Enduring Programmatic Contributions in Behavior Analysis.
- 2011 TAYLOR, A.H., ELLIFFE, D., HUNT, G.R., EMERY, N.J., CLAYTON, N.S., GRAY, R.D. ‘New Caledonian crows learn the functional properties of novel tool types’. PLoS ONE, 6(12), e26887, 14 December. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0026887
- 2011 SARGISSON, R.J., BUTLER, R., ELLIFFE, D. ‘An evaluation of the Aboistop citronella-spray collar as a treatment for barking of domestic dogs’. ISRN Veterinary Science, 759379, 6 pp. http://dx.doi.org/10.5402/2011/759379
- 2011 BOUTROS, N., ELLIFFE, D., DAVISON, M. ‘Examining the discriminative and strengthening effects of reinforcers in concurrent schedules’. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 96, 227-241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2011.96-227
- 2011 COWIE, S., DAVISON, M., ELLIFFE, D. ‘Reinforcement: Food signals the time and location of future food’. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 96, 63-86.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2011.96-63 - 2011 MINSTER, S.T., ELLIFFE, D., MUTHUKUMARASWAMY, S.D. ‘Emergent stimulus relations depend on stimulus correlation and not on reinforcement contingencies’. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 95, 327-342. http://dx.doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2011.95-327
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