Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS pre-commentary entitled Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Delay-of-Reinforcement Gradients and Other Behavioral Mechanisms by A. Charles Catania http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sagvolden-05152002/Referees/ This pre-commentary was invited by the Editor Jeffrey Gray and has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS). It will be co-published with the target article by Sagvolden et al. along with accepted commentaries and the author responses. BBS requests that you consider writing a commentary on this pre-commentary by A. Charles Catania. YOU MAY SUBMIT A PROPOSAL TO COMMENT ON THIS PRE-COMMENTARY, THE TARGET ARTICLE, OR BOTH. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Catania pre-commentary is on this accepted target article A dynamic developmental theory of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) predominantly hyperactive/impulsive and combined subtypes by Terje Sagvolden, Espen Borga Johansen, Heidi Aase, and Vivienne Ann Russell http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sagvolden-05152002/Referees/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= PRE-COMMENTARY ON SAGVOLDEN ET AL. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Delay-of-Reinforcement Gradients and Other Behavioral Mechanisms A. Charles Catania University of Maryland ABSTRACT: Sagvolden, Johansen, Aase, and Russell (SJA&R) examine attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at levels of analysis ranging from neurotransmitters to behavior. At the behavioral level they attribute aspects of ADHD to anomalies of delay-of-reinforcement gradients. With a normal gradient, responses followed after a long delay by a reinforcer may share in the effects of that reinforcer; with a diminished or steepened gradient they may fail to do so. Steepened gradients differentially select rapidly emitted responses (hyperactivity) and they limit the effectiveness with which extended stimuli become conditioned reinforcers, so that observing behavior is less well maintained (attention deficit). Impulsiveness also follows from steepened gradients, which increase the effectiveness of smaller more immediate consequences relative to larger more delayed ones. Individuals who vary in the degree to which their delay gradients are steepened will show different balances between hyperactivity and attention-deficit. Given the range of ADHD phenomena addressed, it may be unnecessary to appeal to additional behavioral processes such as extinction deficit. Extinction deficit is more likely a derivative of attention deficit, in that failure to attend to stimuli differentially correlated with extinction should slow its progress. The account suggests how relatively small differences in delay gradients early in development might engender behavioral interactions leading to very large differences later on. The steepened gradients presumably originate in properties of neurotransmitter function, but behavioral interventions that use consistently short delays of reinforcement to build higher-order behavioral units as a scaffolding to support complex cognitive and social skills may nonetheless be feasible. KEYWORDS: ADHD, delay gradient, hyperactivity, attention deficit, observing responses, extinction deficit, impulsiveness, self-control, exponential decay, intervention http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Sagvolden-05152002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Jeffrey Gray - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------