Learning

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING?SOME LEARNING PROCESSES

SOME EARLY LEARNING MECHANISMSLEARNING IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

• “Considerations on the optimization of educational strategies should take into account knowledge on brain development and learning mechanisms that has been accumulated by neurobiological research over the past decades.” (Singer, in Battro, Fischer & Léna, 2008, p. 97)

Learning as developing an expertiseLearning to become an intelligent novice

Learning deepLearning for understanding Learning for transfer

Learning’s biological underpinningsLearning mechanisms

Learning ….

Learning as acquiring cultural knowledge & skills

Learning as developing or extending natural skills & knowledge

Learning & DevelopmentLearning & Maturation

Molecular – Neural – Individual – Social levels of analysis

Learning ….

Human – Animal – Machine Learning

Learning ….

From here …… To here

Open issues:

How does instruction interacts with learning mechanisms?How do we develop motivations for learning contents we are not predisposed to acquire….

Things we start to better understand:

We do not start from scratchWe have a whole set of learning mechanisms – described at different levels of analysis – and a sort of head start kit that includes knowledge and systems for acquiring new knowledgeThe way the architecture of the brain is altered by experience depends on both experience and genes

Learning

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING?SOME LEARNING PROCESSES

SOME EARLY LEARNING MECHANISMSLEARNING IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

• “any learning, i.e. the modification of computational programs and of stored knowledge, must occur through lasting changes in their functional architecture.” (Singer, 2008, p. 98)

“Learning is the process by which we acquire knowledge about the world.". . . memory is the process by which that knowledge of the world is encoded, stored, and later retrieved.” (Kandel, 2000)

Learning = “the modification of behavior in light of experience” (Goswami (2006)

“altering the integrative properties of individual neurons… changing the anatomical connectivity patterns, …modifying the efficacy of excitatory and/or inhibitory connections. …”(Singer, 2008, p. 98)

Different processes are responsible of the specification/modification of the brain’s functional architecture (and thus, of knowledge acquisition)

Learning and the brain

• (Singer 2008 p. 101)

Learning as one of the mechanisms that modify the functional architecture of the brain, with a certain timingSuch changes can be obtained by altering the integrative properties of individual neurons, by changing the anatomical connectivity patterns, and by modifying the efficacy of excitatory and/or inhibitory connections.… this process of circuit formation and selection according to functional criteria persists until the end of puberty – but it occurs within precisely timed windows that differ for different structures.Once the respective developmental windows close, neurons stop forming new connections and existing connections cannot be removed. The only way to induce further modifications in the now cristallized architecture is to change the efficacy of the existing connections. These functional modifications are assumed to be the basis of adult learning and after puberty are constrained by the invariant anatomical architectures.

Taking place at different moments in life

Learning and the brain

“Evolution, Ontogenetic development,And learning.” (Singer, 2008, p. 98)

The brain stores knowledge even before making experiences:

It’s not a tabula rasa Education cannot be considered as the task

of filling a hollow box

There are constraints to learning:One cannot learn anything at anytimeThe brain is not plastic in the sense of being

indiscriminately modifiable

Critical periods & Brain Plasticity

Certain functions of the brain are more time-locked than others

e.g. ocular dominance columns (Hubel & Wiesel, 1970)

The myth of the first three years(Bruner 1997)

• Different systems have different sensitive periods, they do not develop at the same rate (including within the visual system)

• Not all functions have critical periods

• Learning cannot be reduced to the production of new synapses

The brain is more plastic than accorded before

Different forms of plasticity

« The most fascinating and important property of mammalian brain is its remarkable plasticity, which can be thought of as the ability of experience to modify neural circuitry and thereby to modify future thought, behavior, feeling.» (Malenka, 2002, p. 147)

But not indiscriminate modifications of the architecture of the brain

(Maguire, et al.,2000) (Pascual Leaone et al. 1995) (Draganski et al 2004)

Examples of adult structural plasticity

Learning

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING?SOME LEARNING PROCESSES

SOME EARLY LEARNING MECHANISMSLEARNING IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Scientists in the crib

Observation, experimentation

Curiosity

Core knowledge

Folk knowledge/Naïve representations/Common sense

Several mechanisms , for learning from experience

Curiosity

Observation, experimentation

“statistical learning, learning by imitation, explanation-based or causal learning and learning by analogy. Using these simple learning mechanisms, the brain appears to build up complex representations about how the world is.” (Goswami, 2008, p. 52)

Learning mechanisms

Associative learning

“Babies appear to be able to make connections between events that are reliably associated, even while in the womb.Once outside the womb, they appear to be able to track statistical dependencies in the world, such as conditional probabilities between visual events or between sounds. This turns out to be a very powerful learning mechanism.” (Goswami, 2006)

Statistical learning “Babies are skillful statistical analysts. Experiments showed that eight- month-olds notice if an improbable number of red Ping-Pong balls are taken out of a collection that is mostly white. Variations of the experiments (such as swapping the role of red and white) control against alternative explanations (such as having a greater interest in red objects). Twenty-month-olds tested with green and yellow toys inferred that a person taking an unusually large number of the rare color would prefer to be given a toy of that color. Thus, babies and young chil- dren learn about the world like scientists—by detecting statistical patterns and drawing conclusions from them.” (Gopnik, 2010)

Causal learning

The basic idea is that children develop their everyday knowledge of the world using the same cognitive devices that adults use in science. In particular, children develop abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, particularly causal entities and rules.That is, they develop theories. ..Children actively experiment with and explore the world, testing the predictions of the theory and gathering relevant evidence…Eventually, however, when many predictions of the theory are falsified, the child begins to seek alternative theories (Gopnik 2003)

Implicit learning Implicit learning is characterized as learning that proceeds both unintentionally and unconsciously …Reber (1967) who coined the terme implicit learning, asked participants to study a series of letter strings such as VXVS for a few seconds each. The he told them that all these strings were contructed according to a particuler set of rules (that is, a grammar) and that in the test phase they would see some new strings and have to decide which ones conformed to the new rules and which ones did not. Participants could make these decisions with better-than-chance accuracy but had little ability to describe the rules.” (Shanks, 1996 in: Lamberts & Goldstone: Handbook of cognition )

“In learning by analogy, “we face a situation, we recall a similar situation, we match them up, we reason, and we learn” (Winston, 1980). We may decide whether a dog has a heart by thinking about whether people have hearts (young children use “personification analogies” to learn about biological kinds, see Inagaki & Hatano, 1988), or we may solve a mathematical problem about the interaction of forces by using an analogy to a tug-of-war (young children use familiar physical systems to reason about unfamiliar ones, …)”.

Learning by analogy

“Child development is today conceptualized as an essentially social process, based on incremental knowledge acquisition driven by cultural experience and social context. We have “social” brains.” (Goswami, 2008, p. 1)

Social learning mechanisms

Imitation / Rational imitation Mind reading / Theory of mind Shared attention/ Shared intentions

Cooperation Testimony

The unit of analysis of cognitive performances should be extended beyond the individual so as to encompass social and material interactions with tool (Hutchins, 1995)

Distributed cognition

Learning in a social and extended perspective

“… the brain does not exist in isolation but rather is a fundamental but interacting component of a developing or aging individual who is a mere actor in the larger theater of life. This theater is undeniably social, beginning with prenatal care, mother-infant attachment, and early childhood experiences, and ending with loneliness or social support and with familiar or societal decisions about care for the elderly. … Social psychology, with its panoramic focus on the effects of human association and the impact of society on the individual, is therefore a fundamental although sometimes unaknowledged complement to the neurosciences.” (Cacioppo & Berentson, 1992, p. 1020)

a multilevel, integrative analysis

Learning

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING?SOME LEANRING PROCESSES

SOME EARLY LEARNING MECHANISMSLEARNING IN AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE

Long childhood

Bigger brains

Adapted fo culture

Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This species-unique form of social cognition emerges in human ontogeny at approximately 1 year of age, as infants begin to engage with other persons in various kinds of joint attentional activities involving gaze following, social referencing, and gestural communication. Young children’s joint attentional skills then engender some uniquely powerful forms of cultural learning, enabling the acquisition of language, discourse skills, tool-use practices, and other conventional activities. These novel forms of cultural learning allow human beings to, in effect, pool their cognitive resources both contemporaneously and over historical time in ways that are unique in the animal kingdom. (Tomasello, 1999)

Learning is a basic, adaptive function of humans. More than any other species, people are designed to be flexible learners and active agents in acquiring knowledge and skills. Much of what people learn occurs without formal instruction, but highly systematic and organized information systems—reading, mathematics, the sciences, literature, and the history of a society—require formal training, usually in schools. (Bransford et al, 2000)

From here… To here

Biologically primary

Learning…

Biologically secondary

e.g. TalkingWalkingTracking

e.g. Reading DancingMaking science

Coming easilyNatural motivationWith no explicit instruction

Coming with effortNo immediate motivationNeeds instructionDomain specificity

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing a child's nobility to flower. Rather education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history... Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy or pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun... they are not necessarily motivated in their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics.(Pinker 2002, p. 222).

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones. This chapter is a primer on the concepts and arguments that animate it. (Cosmides & Tooby, n.d.)

….

Leftovers

Cognitive functions that are associated with or necessary for learning• Attention• Memory• Emotions• Rewards• Imagination• Intelligence• ….

Teaching : Learning in a social perspective

Knowledge of the young child and how it progresses