Event Abstract

Back to Event

Teaching and learning from a cognitive scientific view: Innerpersonal and interpersonal understanding of education

Katsumi Watanabe1*
  • 1 Waseda University, Japan

Education, teaching and learning are all complex phenomena, influenced by individual characteristics of learners and teachers, materials used, learning environments, learning and teaching methods, and interactions among learners and between learners and teachers. Some processes are explicit and others are implicit. Some studies focus on basic processes such as learning rate and others report observations from actual fields of education. Yet, the interests and demand of merging scientific data from basic research and practical knowledge from actual practices are still increasing in education. In this talk, I will introduce several lines of research from my laboratory toward possible interactions between experimental basic research and practical fields of education. The first set of two studies concern individual and group differences of learners. In one study, we examined visual working memory, which enables active holding of visual information for a certain period of time (Tsubomi, Fukuda, Watanabe & Vogel, 2013). We tested visual working memory capacity and distractor resistance in students in a Japanese primary school and found that the capacity and distractor resistance increased as age increased and reached adult levels around 10 years old. Further, the visual working memory component that linked to academic performance changed with age (Tsubomi & Watanabe, 2017). I will speculate on how visual working memory develops and becomes distractor-resistance in elementary school children and their relations to academic performances in the classroom. In the other study, we investigated visual-motor sequence learning in children with developmental disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Asperger syndrome (AS). The participants explored to find out a hidden sequence of button presses and repeated the learned sequence so that they would perform it better. We found that there were specific patterns of making mistakes in ADHD and AS children and they were tended to be slow in performing the task. However, learning curves of ADHD and AS children were virtually identical to that of the control group (Watanabe, Ikeda & Miyao, 2010). This finding point to the importance of examining processes rather than mere outcomes of learning. The second set of two studies deal with behavioral contagion and interpersonal synchrony. Behavioral contagion is omnipresent; people tend to imitate each other. From low-level sensorimotor interactions to high-level conceptual processes, imitating other people occurs implicitly. I introduce our study on behavioral contagion (Watanabe, 2008) and discuss how execution and/or preparation speed of behaviors is affected by observation of others’ behaviors, even for simple tasks such as single button press (Watanabe, 2008). This finding has implications for learning and teaching environments, where a learner is never alone but rather implicitly influencing and is influenced by other learners and teachers. Education, teaching, and learning involve reciprocal interactions. Therefore, another basis for better understanding of education is self-organizing interpersonal brain and bodily synchrony. While many studies show sensorimotor synchronization in periodic actions, behavioral synchrony also occurs in more complex, real life situations. Our studies have shown that interpersonal synchronization occurs even without explicit instruction (Watanabe et al., 2011; Yun et al., 2012). Here, it is important to emphasize that the connected network between two bodies and brains changes rather than each individual body and brain. I discuss how the implicit processes of behavioral contagion and interpersonal synchrony might support a concept of dynamic, interactive, and context dependent teaching and education (Watanabe, 2013, 2016). Finally, based on the above-mentioned findings and observations, I would like to discuss with people in the floor how individual characteristics of learners and teachers, learning environments, learning and teaching methods, and interactions among learners and between learners and teachers. In addition, if I have spare time, I would like to introduce other researches of the enhancement of learning by social reward (Sugawara, Tanaka, Okazaki, Watanabe & Sadato, 2012), the enhancement of creativity by different sensory stimulation (Mougenot, Ikeda & Watanabe, 2013).

References

Tsubomi, H., Fukuda, K., Watanabe, K., & Vogel, E. K. (2013) Neural limits to representing objects still within view. Journal of Neuroscience, 33 (19), 8257-8263

Tsubomi, H., & Watanabe, K. (2017) Development of visual working memory and distractor resistance in relation to academic performance. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 154, 98-112.

Watanabe, K., Ikeda, H., & Miyao, M (2010) Learning efficacy of explicit visuomotor sequences in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and Asperger syndrome. Experimental Brain Research, 203, 233-239

Watanabe, K. (2008). Behavioral speed contagion: Automatic modulation of movement timing by observation of body movements. Cognition, 106, 1514–1524.

Watanabe, K., Abe, M. O., Takahashi, K. & Shimojo, S. (2011). Short-term active interactions enhance implicit behavioral mirroring. Program No. 832.20. 2011 Neuroscience Meeting Planner, Washington DC, Society for Neuroscience.

Yun, K., Watanabe, K., & Shimojo, S. (2012). Interpersonal body and neural synchronization as a marker of implicit social interaction. Scientific Reports, 2, 959.

Watanabe, K. (2013) Teaching as a dynamic phenomenon with interpersonal interactions. Mind, Brain and Education, 7 (2), 91-100

Watanabe, K. (2016) Teaching and Learning as interpersonal and innerpersonal phenomena: Where bodies and minds meet. Mind, Brain and Education at Erice: Ten Years., Battro AM, Fischer KW & Majdalani ML (Eds.), Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture.

Sugawara, S.K, Tanaka, S., Okazaki, S., Watanabe, K., & Sadato, N. (2012) Social rewards enhance offline improvements in motor skill. PLoS One, 7 (11), e48174.

Mougenot C., Ikeda H., Watanabe K. (2013) Influence of designers' kansei on design outcomes. International Journal of Affective Engineering, 12 (2), 245-250.

Keywords: Teaching, Learning, working memory, developmental disorders, social reward, Behavioral contagion, synchronization

Conference: 3rd International Conference on Educational Neuroscience, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 11 Mar - 12 Mar, 2018.

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation (invited speakers only)

Topic: Educational Neuroscience

Citation: Watanabe K (2018). Teaching and learning from a cognitive scientific view: Innerpersonal and interpersonal understanding of education. Conference Abstract: 3rd International Conference on Educational Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.225.00005

Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.

The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.

Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.

For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.

Received: 21 Feb 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Prof. Katsumi Watanabe, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, katz@waseda.jp