1. ECC 2012-13
How to favor a good encounter
POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MIND-BRAIN-BEHAVIORAL
SCIENCES TO EDUCATION
Growing body of knowledge
Methods and models
A view
SLIPPERY SLOPES
STRATEGIES

2. ECC 2012-13
Vows for a good marriage
Assess the common
interests (reasons)
Assess the dowry
(contributions)
Assess the slippery slopes
(risks, misuses, potential
and actual
misunderstandings)

3. ECC 2012-13
A premise: Reasons
Learning
- A teaching species with
social learning
mechanisms for cultural
transmission and for
filling-in the
cospecifics’s
knowledge gap
- Motivation
- Cognitive abilities

4. ECC 2012-13
Reasons
Learning
- A natural adaptive
function in the animal
reign
- In higher animals, a
function of the brain
- The brain modifies itself as
a consequence of new
experiences that produce
long-lasting behavioral
changes

5. ECC 2012-13
Reasons
Learning
- The brain is not rubber-like
- The ways it endures
modifications is prescribed
by its properties and
constrained by its own
history
- Learning is not the only
process for altering the
brain’s functional
architecture (knowledge
acquisition)

6. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Singer 2008 p. 101)
¤ Learning as one of the mechanisms that modify the functional
architecture of the brain, with a certain timing
¤ Such 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.

7. ECC 2012-13
Contributions: Knowledge 1
Constraints
Learning processes
Timing
Associated functions

8. ECC 2012-13
Contributions: Knowledge 2
• Human Learning mechanisms:
• associative learning,
• statistical learning, …
• Social learning mechanisms
• Pacton & Perruchet 2006
• Kuhl 2004
• Imitation
• Tomasello 1999, Whiten 2000:
• Cultural transmission
• Sperber 1996

9. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Goswami 2008 p. 3-4)
¤ At least three types of learning also appear to be functioning from
very early in development. One is 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.
¤ The second type of learning that appears to be available early is
learning by imitation. This may be particularly important for the
development of social cognition.
¤ Finally, infants appear to be able to connect causes and effects by
using “explanation based” learning. … The causal inferences made
by infants provide an extremely powerful mechanism for learning
about the world. Infants are not simply detecting causal regularities
but appear to be constructing causal explanations for new
phenomena on the basis of their prior knowledge. One mechanism
they use is learning by analogy.

10. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Pacton & Perruchet 2006)
¤ Pour certains, l’apprentissage scolaire viendrait expliciter des
connaissances déjà acquises implicitement par l’enfant.
¤ Selon cette conception, l’apprentissage implicite conduirait à une
connaissance abstraite, fondamentalement de même nature que
la connaissance résultant d’une instruction dirigée. La seule
différence serait le caractère inconscient ou conscient de la
connaissance.
¤ Or, les études d’apprentissage implicite en laboratoire, comme
celles sur l’apprentissage implicite de certains aspects de
l’orthographe, vont à l’encontre d’une telle conception. Elles
indiquent en effet que les processus d’apprentissage implicite ne
conduisent pas à la connaissance implicite des règles que l'école
pourvoit explicitement. Ils reposent sur des formes adaptatives
alternatives.

11. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Kuhl 2010)
¤ We were struck by the fact that infants exposed to Mandarin were
socially very engaged in the language sessions and began to
wonder about the role of social interaction in learning. Would
infants learn if they were exposed to the same information in the
absence of a human being, say, via television or an audiotape? If
statistical learning is sufficient, the television and audio-only
conditions should produce learning. Infants who were exposed to
the same foreign-language material at the same time and at the
same rate, but via standard television or audiotape only, showed no
learning—their performance equaled that of infants in the control
group who had not been exposed to Mandarin at all (Figure 5).
¤ Thus, the presence of a human being interacting with the infant
during language exposure, while not required for simpler statistical-
learning tasks (Maye et al., 2002; Saffran et al., 1996), is critical for
learning in complex natural language-learning situations in which
infants heard an average of 33,000 Mandarin syllables from a total
of four different talkers over a 4–5-week period (Kuhl et al., 2003).

12. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Gergely & Csibra 2008)
¤ We propose that human communication is specifically adapted to
allow the transmission of generic knowledge between individuals.
Such a communication system, which we call ‘natural pedagogy’,
enables fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque
cultural knowledge that would be hard to acquire relying on purely
observational learning mechanisms alone. We argue that human
infants are prepared to be at the receptive side of natural
pedagogy (i) by being sensitive to ostensive signals that indicate
that they are being addressed by communication, (ii) by
developing referential expectations in ostensive contexts and (iii) by
being biased to interpret ostensive-referential communication as
conveying information that is kind-relevant and generalizable.

13. ECC 2012-13
Contributions: Knowledge 3
• Teaching as a natural
cognitive ability
• Strauss 2005: Folk
pedagogy
• Gergely & Csibra
2008: Natural
Pedagogy

14. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Tomasello 1999)
¤ 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.

15. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Whiten 2000)
¤ One of the important ways in which primates exploit these complex
social worlds is to selectively tap the expertise already acquired by
others, either directly, by scrounging resources from them, or more
indirectly, by learning from them (Russon, 1997). The key adaptation is
one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as
intentional agents like the self.
¤ …The most thorough way in which an animal may learn from the
actions of another is to imitate or copy it. Such a copying process
operating across a whole community could lead to population-level
similarities of behavior—a ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ in biologists’
terminology.
¤ … First is a category (nonsocial processes) that includes all those cases
that do not even require social interaction between A and B: for
example, two apes who never meet but who are faced with similar
fruits in their environments, may learn by their own individual efforts
(individual learning) how to peel the fruit in the same, perhaps optimal,
fashion. By contrast, in the category of social influence B does affect A
in some way: however, unlike in the third category, social learning, B
does not learn any part of the similarity in acts from A: in the case of
exposure, for example, by simply tending to be with A, B gets exposed
to a similar environment which it learns to respond to in a matching
fashion.

16. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Whiten 2000)
¤ If culture is defined in the most general way as behavioral
conformity spread or maintained by nongenetic means, then these
means must involve either social learning or social influence of the
types indicated in Figure 1. Social influence and stimulus
enhancement appear to be widespread among birds and
mammals (see Heyes & Galef, 1996), and thus so do cultures,
defined in this way. The opening of milk-bottle tops by blue-tits, the
spread of which in the UK was carefully documented, was one of
the first of many examples (Hinde & Fisher, 1951). Studies with
captive birds showed that social enhancement, in which the results
of the expert bird’s actions (opened containers) drew the attention
of novices to the new food source, would be sufficient to cause the
spread of such a behavior in the population (Sherry & Galef, 1984).
Stimulus enhancement may be the main way in which young
primates learn about what foods to eat and how to find them
(Fragaszy & Visalberghi, 1996; Whiten, 1989; Visalberghi, 1994). …

17. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Whiten 2000)
…
¤ However, there is clearly more to human culture than this kind of
process. Galef (1992) suggested that since human culture rests upon
sophisticated social learning processes that include imitation and
teaching, it is misleading to talk of animal ‘culture’ unless trans- mission
occurs through mechanisms this complex. If the mechanisms operative
in pri- mates are no more than, say, stimulus enhancement, it might be
more proper to say that we have an analogy of human culture, rather
than any homologous processes that would give a real insight into
evolutionary origins. Galef suggested that if we have only an analog we
might be best to refrain from talk of ‘culture’ and simply refer to
‘traditions’. Of course, which actual terms we use to highlight this
distinction is arbitrary (one could make a similar argument about the
‘corruption’ of the anthropomorphic term, ‘tradition’!), but Galef is
making a significant point about the distinction itself. Accordingly we
are back to issues of cognition: the nature of the cognitive process of
transmission matters in understanding what kinds of traditions, or
cultures, really operate among nonhuman primates.
¤ Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner (1993) also emphasized the special
nature of what they called ‘cultural learning’ in humans, suggesting
that even in young children, true imitation rests upon abilities to
recognize the intentional structure of actions in others in a way that
other apes do not naturally do. Again, then, what apes have to tell us
about the origins of culture is argued to hinge crucially on the cognitive
underpinnings of how social learning actually takes place.

18. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Sperber 1996)
¤ (culture) the cumulative effect of countless processes of
interindividual transmission through imitation
¤ (Strauss 2005)
¤ The goal of teaching is to pass on one’s knowledge to someone
who knows less in an attempts to close the gap in knowledge.

19. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Strauss 2005)
¤ Teaching, or folk pedagogy, the social transformation of
knowledge from one person to another or the attempt to engender
it in others, is one of the most remarkable of human enterprises. I
propose that teaching, which is central to education in the broad
sense of that term, can also be seen as an essential domain of
inquiry for the cognitive sciences. This is also because, as I attempt
to show, teaching may be a natural cognitive ability and is essential
to what it means to be a human being. Furthermore, I believe that
a search for the cognitive underpinnings of teaching may lead to a
description of some of the fundamental building blocks of human
cognition and its development. …
¤ A broad view of teaching includes at least four levels of
explanation for the cognitive machinery in the mind associated
with teaching: an evolutionary adaptive problem that machinery
solved, the cognitive programs that solve that problem, the
neurophysiological infrastructure that serves as a base for the
cognitive program, and the cultural underpinnings that are
deigned by and support the above.

20. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Strauss 2005)
¤ In broad terms, a natural cognitive ability is species-specific, universal and
young children effortlessly learn the domain in question without instruction. …
¤ First … teaching with ToM may be species-typical. The cognition underlying
teaching among some species of animals and human beings has not been
thoroughly examined. There is little controversy that chimpanzees, our closest
relatives, and other primates do not teach with a theory of mind…
¤ A second motivation for teaching as a natural cognitive ability is that although
other primates do not seem to teach with a ToM, it is incontrovertible that
teaching with a ToM is universal among human beings. This means that, with
few exceptions, every person in every society has taught (toddlers and some
autistic individuals may be exceptions here) and has been taught by others…
These are universal activities that take place in everyday life in the home, the
streets, the workplace, and the fields. There is considerable cross-cultural
variation concerning the amount of teaching that takes place … and the
content of what is taught … The importance of the claim of universality is
twofold. It means that everyone is exposed to teaching, which is to say that
everyone has the possibility to learn to teach by virtue of that exposure, and
that very universality suggests that is may be a characteristic of human’s
biological and cultural endowments.
¤ Third, teaching is an extraordinarily complex enterprise that has much to do
with mind, emotions, and motivation-reading. …

21. ECC 2012
2012-13
¤ (Strauss 2005)
¤ Fourth is the poverty of the stimulus argument. One of the many
remarkable aspects of teaching is that so much of it is invisible to the eye.
The visible part is the external acts of teaching… the visible part of
teaching is quite impoverished in comparison to the depth of what
underlies it, the part that is not revealed to the eye, and what is invisible is
the inferences teachers make and the mental processes that lead to these
inferences…
¤ Fifth, teaching is a specialized social interaction, unlike others. Yet it shares
some aspects of other kinds of social interaction…. What stands at the
heart of these social interactions is the intentionality of the individuals
involved in the social interactions…
¤ Sixth, although teaching is universal among human beings, it seems to be
learned without formal education, or even education of the informal kind.
A sliver of the 6 billion inhabitants of planet earth has been taught how to
teach; yet all know how to teach. All have been exposed to pedagogy;
they have been taught but, with few exceptions, they have had no
instruction about how to teach. … The fact that people have not been
taught how to teach does not mean it is not learned.
¤ Seven, very young children teach. There are two kinds of evidence that
bear on this matter: Toddlers may request teaching and youngsters teach.

22. ECC 2012-13
Contributions: models & methods
Cognitive
neuroscience
AI
Cognitive Developmental
psychology & Evolutionary
psychology

23. ECC 2012-13
Contributions: A (scientific) view
Scientific view of teaching
Intutitions about teaching
Scientific view of the mind
ToM

24. ECC 2012-13
How to favor a good encounter
POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MIND-BRAIN-BEHAVIORAL
SCIENCES TO EDUCATION
Growing body of knowledge
Methods and models
A view
SLIPPERY SLOPES
STRATEGIES

25. ECC 2012-13
Risks: contents
1. Getting the science 2. And the seductive
wrong, or: the trap of allure of
neuromyths neuroscience

26. ECC 2012-13
Risks: use
4. And the Illusion of
3. Normative Fallacy direct transfer

27. ECC 2012-13
Risks: evidence
6. And empirical
5. cargo-cult evidence pointillisme

28. ECC 2012-13
Risks: meaningfulness
8. And lack of
7. Triviality interest

29. ECC 2012-13
Risks: isolation
10. And one-way
9. Disciplinary
road
restriction

30. ECC 2012-13
How to favor a good encounter
POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MIND-BRAIN-BEHAVIORAL
SCIENCES TO EDUCATION
Growing body of knowledge
Methods and models
A view
SLIPPERY SLOPES
STRATEGIES

31. ECC 2012-13
questions
How to produce new
knowledge that is useful
and usable?
How to make existing
knowledge available and
usable?
How to build a new
translational research
field?

32. ECC 2012-13
MODELS
Evidence-based
medicine Translational medicine

33. ECC 2012-13
Models
¤ (Evans Thornton Chalmers Glasziou 2011, p. 1)
¤ Without fair – unbiased – evaluations, useless or even harmful
treatments may be prescribed because they are thought to be
helpful or, conversely, helpful treatments may be dismissed as
useless. And fair tests should be applied to all treatments, no
matter what their origin or whether they are viewed as
conventional or complementary/alternative. Untested theories
about treatment effects, however convincing they may sound,
are just not enough. Some theories have predicted that
treatments would work, but fair tests have revealed otherwise;
other theories have confidently predicted that treatments
would not work when, in fact, tests showed that they did.

34. ECC 2012-13
EBM
• Tracing best evidence
• Classification
- Meta-analyses
• Disseminating best evidence
• International collaborations
for the production and
publication of meta-analyses
and
• Journals dedicated to
evidence
• Centers EBM training

35. ECC 2012-13
2 questions left aside:
How to produce
new evidence that is
useful?
How to favor
adoption?

36. ECC 2012-13
TM
• From bench to bedside
• selection of knowledge for pre-
clinical and clinical trials
• research aimed at applications
• From bedside to bench
identification of real needs of
real patients in ecological conditions,
including reasons of non-adoption
knowledge issued from
human clinical trials is re-injected
backwards

37. ECC 2012-13
¤ (Marincola 2003)
¤ The purpose of translational research is to test, in humans, novel
therapeutic strategies developed through experimentation. This
concept is so popular that Bench to Bedside Awards were
developed within the NIH to encourage collaboration between
clinicians and basic scientists across institutes. But a more realistic
approach would be to encourage opportunities to pursue Bedside
to Bench research since our understanding of human disease is still
limited and pre-clinical models have shown a discouraging
propensity to fail when applied to humans. Translational research
should be regarded as a two-way road: Bench to Bedside and
Bedside to Bench.
¤ … Indeed, the scientist attempting to dissect scientifically human
diseases as they evolve has to confront unique challenges related
with the genetic polymorphism of our species, the extreme and
evolving heterogeneity of some diseases (such as cancer or viral
disease) and often external constraints posed by ethical and
practical considerations. Thus, some prefer to pre-fabricate animal
models resembling human diseases to enable the mathematical
prediction of a given treatment outcome by simplifying its biology
through standardization of the genetic makeup of animals and
diseases. These models, however, do not represent the basic
essence of human diseases…

38. ECC 2012-13
¤ (Brabeck 2008)
¤ Those of us who conduct educational research have a new
paradigm to guide our work, if we choose to use it. Like other
research initiatives, such as evidence-based practice, this model
finds its genesis in the medical sciences, and is coined "translational
research.”
¤ … In education, not unlike medicine, vital knowledge too often
remains with the researchers and is unavailable to the professionals
who are in positions to help children and youths-that is, the teachers.
We have a similar "clinical lab to classroom" gap.

39. ECC2012
Education/Medicine
¤ Similarities ¤ Differences between
¤ … medicine & education:
¤ evidence is much more
spurious
¤ organisms and journals
for the classification and
dissemination of
evidence are rare
¤ policies are national
¤ training is not a priority
¤ the profession is less
valued
¤ the profession is not
scientifically-literate

40. ECC 2012-13
¤ (Sawyer 2008, p. 13-14)
¤ The golden standard of scientific methodology is the experimental
design, in which students are randomly assigned to different
learning environments. Many education studies are quasi-
experimental … they identify two existing classrooms that seem to
be identical in every way, and use one teaching method in one
classroom, a different teaching method in another classroom, and
analyze which students learn more and better.
¤ … learning scientists have drawn on ethnography …
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis … and sociocultural
anthropology…
¤ Many learning scientists study the moment-to-moment processes of
learning, typically by gathering large amounts of videotape data,
and they use a range of methodologies … known as interaction
analysis …
¤ … learning scientists also study longer term learning

41. ECC 2012-13
Preconditions
• Include mind-brain-
behavior studies in
the professional
development of
teachers
• Understand the
teacher’ mind