Chapter 5 - Textbook

Question 1

what do neuroscientists do?

Answer 1

• ask research questions about the neurobiological basis of learning
• might examine how the brain processes information, forms memories, and adapts in response to experiences by studying how neurons interact with one another and make brain wide connections through the formation of neural networks

Question 2

what do neuropsychologists do?

Answer 2

assist patients with rehabilitation and the management of everyday functioning following injury or illness to the brain and spinal cord.

Question 3

what is the aim of the work of neuroscientists?

Answer 3

• the aim here is to identify how the brain changes chemically and structurally during memory formation, information storage and retrieval

Question 4

what’s the aim of neuropsychologists

Answer 4

The aim here is to assist with management and rehabilitation from neurological conditions due to traumatic brain injury, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, or developmental disorders

Question 5

Based on assessment results, neuropsychologists create _

Answer 5

personalized plans to address specific learning and memory issues
- such plans may include changing ones daily routines, creating special memory aids to assist with managing academic and work tasks, organizing the environment to reduce noise and clutter to assist with focus and attention, engaging in computer based attention training, and even executive functioning coaching to enhance planning, organizing, and decision-making skills

Question 6

What did Jean Piaget study?

Answer 6

developmental changes in children’s intelligence

Question 7

Piaget characterized children’s reasoning and intellectual development into distinct stages. This branch of study is uniquely called_

Answer 7

genetic epistemology because it also recognizes the role of biology (genetics) in our capacity to acquire knowledge (epistemology)

Question 8

Define Piaget’s epistemology. This allows his approaches to learning to be classified under _ and _

Answer 8

the branch of philosophy concerned with the scope of our knowledge (the extent and range of what we can know as we develop) and its limitations (the boundaries and constraints on our understanding)
- psychology and philosophy

Question 9

In psychology, how we acquire and use knowledge is studied mostly by _

Answer 9

cognitive psychologists

Question 10

What are cognitive psychologists interested in?

Answer 10

These researchers are interested in designing studies to explore mental processes such as those involved in attention, language processing, and memory and decision making

Question 11

our capacity to learn is closely interconnected with and our _

Answer 11

cognitive capabilities
- learning requires memory, so that what we have learned is accessible when we need it! At the same time, learning is a skill. How this skill develops over time and the strategies we can use to polish and refine this skill is a major topic of exploration in the cognitive sciences.

Question 12

Recent advances in machine learning algorithms have led to the creation of a new sub-discipline at the intersection of _, _ and _called _

Answer 12

psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence (AI): computational neuroscience

Question 13

For a computational neuroscientist, understanding computational models of learning can help _

Answer 13

• draw parallels between how the brain organizes, processes, and responds to incoming information
• a current development of interest to both scientists and the wider public is the accessibility to a language learning model (LLM) developed by the company OpenAI: ChatGPT

Question 13

ChatGPT uses information available on the internet to _

Answer 13

learn patterns in how we write, making predictions on the typical order of words in any given sentence
ex. when prompted with “She loves,” the model might generate “reading books” based on its training on common phrases and sentence structures in written English

Question 14

Name some limitations of ChatGPT

Answer 14

• using it as a study guide, answering homework questions, or assisting in writing research papers
• ChatGPT responses are limited to information ending in the fall of 2021+ since the data is from publicly available text, it may include biased and factually incorrect information
• since the model generates human-like responses by filling in gaps between words, similar to how a human may write, ChatGPT generates content that seems accurate but may actually incorrect

Question 15

What’s the primary focus of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 15

Piaget’s theory is about the stages of cognitive development with special attention to how children construct knowledge through their interactions with their environment

Question 16

there is a field in educational psychology also known as pedagogical psychology that applies

Answer 16

our understanding of learning to identify instructional and study approaches to promote and retain new information

Question 17

Often, pedagogy researchers have background in _. This allows them to _

Answer 17

both educational psychology, and cognitive psychology
- this allows them to apply a combination of psychological and cognitive methods to develop and evaluate instructional strategies, curriculum design, assessment methods, and classroom management techniques to assist educators in their teaching methods and and learners in their studying practices

Question 18

define lifelong learning

Answer 18

Given the rapid increase in technological advances, our personal and professional life demands require us to continue updating our knowledge and skills throughout life

Question 19

define learning

Answer 19

a relatively permanent change in behaviour or knowledge resulting from experience that is not due to reflexes, fatigue, aging, drugs, injury or disease
*different from reflexes (like eye blink, requires no training)!

Question 20

contrast learning and reflexes

Answer 20

While reflexes are immediate responses to our ever-changing environment, learning is comparatively slower and more effortful

Question 21

Successful learning allows for _

Answer 21

problem-solving, making informed decisions based on current and previous experiences, and approximate predictions of future outcomes.

Question 22

why is learning “relatively permanent?”

Answer 22

while the behavioural changes are stable, they are still modifiable by future experiences or reshaped due to memories of past events

Question 23

What describes the application of Language Learning Models

Answer 23

LLMs can offer clues into how humans process language and learn new information

Question 24

Define neuromyth

Answer 24

A misconception generated by a misunderstanding, a misreading, or a misquoting of facts scientifically established to make a case in education and other contexts

Question 25

Our current advances in understanding how the brain learns have led to a growing interest by teachers at all levels in applying

Answer 25

research findings to their educational practices
*but for non experts like us it takes a lot of time and effort to fully interpret the research findings of an empirical paper.

Question 26

What is the OECD?

Answer 26

• The Brain and Learning Project of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
• an international organization that partners with governments and policy centres to recommend solutions to world challenges, including education reform

Question 27

the OECD was concerned about the increase of _

Answer 27

• neuromyths
• due to “pressure to improve overall school performance and excitement and interest about education that could be brain-based, many myths and misconceptions have arisen around the mind and brain outside of the scientific community”

Question 28

When Dr. Sanne Dekker from the University in Amsterdam and their team studied the prevalence of neuromyths in primary and secondary school teachers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, they found that _

Answer 28

even teachers can not easily distinguish between pseudoscience and scientific information
- For example, most teachers in the study agreed on several neuromyths, including that students learn better when informed about their learning styles and that hemispheric dominance can explain individual differences. Some also believed that we use only 10% of our brains

Question 29

what are 3 common misconceptions about learning?

Answer 29

1) describing person as left or right brain -oversimplifies that sensory and cognitive processes involve both
2) distinct learning styles that match specific capabilities - limited evidence
3) belief that we use only 10% of brain
- various regions of the brain are active during our daily tasks and activities

Question 30

Based on the consistent observation that university and college students’ increasing use of laptops for note-taking, Drs. Pam Mueller from Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer from the University of California wondered if _

Answer 30

relying on laptops for note-taking, a typical behaviour in their students, was the best approach. Or is the old-fashioned method of handwriting more beneficial?

Question 31

Describe one experiment (by Drs. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer) conducted to find the answer to their research question

Answer 31

-In one experiment, undergraduate students from Princeton University watched 15-minute TED Talks covering new topics
- lectures were projected onto a screen at the front of the room, and the participants were instructed to use their typical note-taking strategy (longhand notes versus typed notes)
- participants then completed two short (5-minute) distractor tasks engaging their working memory capacity
- After about 30 minutes, study participants responded to both factual-recall questions (e.g., “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?”) and conceptual-application questions

Question 32

What did Oppenheimer and Mueller’s study find?

Answer 32

• those who hand-wrote had less verbatim writing (i.e., word-to-word descriptions of the videos) and wrote shorter notes than those who typed
• on factual-recall questions, participants performed about the same
• on conceptual-application questions, those who used written notes performed better

Question 33

In a follow-up study at the University of California by the same researchers, using the same methodology as above, participants were divided into _

Answer 33

a laptop-nonintervention and longhand condition
- told to take notes in lecture like what they take in class, and that they will be tested
- the laptop-interventioncondition weretold to not transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking about it

Question 34

what did the uni of california follow up study find? What suggestions did this lead to?

Answer 34

Similar to the findings from the first study, on conceptual-application questions, longhand participants performed better
- suggesting that students avoid using laptops while taking notes in class

Question 35

A group of 88 (yes, 88!) researchers from three major universities formed a team to replicate the Muleller and Oppenhiemer study using the methodology from the original paper. Describe the methods

Answer 35

• the team recruited 145 undergraduate students from Tufts University (USA)
• first, the students watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop or longhand followed by a distractor which meant they were not allowed to study their notes
• they then took a quiz

Question 36

what did the replicated study find?

Answer 36

• not surprisingly, the laptop users notes included more verbatim items by the lecturer than the notes of longhand participants
• however, laptop participants did not perform better than longhand participants on the quiz

Question 37

A recently published finding in January of 2024 (norwegian researchers) studied brain connectivity using

Answer 37

EEG to map the neural networks activated in longhand note writing versus typing

Question 38

Describe the methods in the norwegian study on brain connectivity

Answer 38

• ~40 ppl
• participant either wrote in longhand or typed a word across 30 trials depending on the instructions by the experimenters
• Before each trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 seconds to either write by hand or type the word multiple times
• EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 seconds of each trial
• To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the participant was typewriting

Question 39

What did the Norwegian study find?

Answer 39

• a marked difference in connectivity across brain regions involved in learning and memory depending on whether a participants was writing or typing
• there was increased connectivity for handwriting over typewriting, suggesting that different underlying cognitive processes are involved in the two tasks

Question 39

“Handwriting requires _, and it forces students to pay attention to what they are doing.

Answer 39

fine motor control over the fingers

Question 40

Typing, on the other hand, requires _

Answer 40

mechanical and repetitive movements that trade awareness for speed

Question 41

The norwegian study results reveal that whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy:

Answer 41

more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity
- It appears that the movements related to typewriting do not activate these connectivity networks the same way that handwriting does.