Event Abstract

Back to Event

Looking at the brain under naturalistic conditions: an opportunity for educational neuroscience

Mohamed L. Seghier1*, Claudine Habak1 and Mohamed A. Fahim1
  • 1 Emirates College for Advanced Education, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, United Arab Emirates

Neuro-educators are interested in identifying neuroscience evidence that is relevant and useful for education. A large proportion of that neuroscience evidence comes from neuroimaging studies that investigated brain structure and function in both healthy and clinical populations, with imaging (i.e. fMRI) and electrophysiological techniques (e.g. EEG). These techniques have been widely used to explore brain function under different contexts and tasks, including memory, reading, writing, number processing, attention, emotion, decision making and multisensory processing. However, many of these findings were obtained in ‘lab’ conditions using simplistic stimuli delivered in artificial time-sensitive ways that rarely mirror real-world contexts. Brain function with experimental time-sensitive paradigm designs: For neuro-educators, it is important to understand some of the limitations of the experimental manipulations (i.e. paradigm designs) used in functional brain mapping so that they can appreciate what can or cannot be inferred from neuroimaging studies. For instance, early fMRI studies used block design tasks (adapted from the PET literature), where sets of similar stimuli are typically presented in blocks, with stimulus conditions changing from block to block. Another type known as event-related design offers much more flexibility (Josephs and Henson, 1999), where stimulus sequences (sets of pseudorandomised brief events or trials) can be related to series of transient changes in brain activity (Clark, 2012). Mixed block/event-related designs have also been used to allow a better characterisation of transient and sustained task-related brain activations (Visscher et al., 2003). Every type of design has its limitations and advantages and thus it is important to take them into account when pooling fMRI findings from different studies with different paradigm designs. The use of such controlled designs has reduced the question of brain mapping into a mere identification of time-locked activated blobs, and any brain changes (transient or sustained) that do not exactly follow the predicted experimental models are typically ignored. Yet, current literature in educational neuroscience shows that almost all neuroscience evidence is taken from studies that used block or event-related designs. This ignores another emerging type of studies that uses free-behaviour designs (Lowe, 2012; Maguire, 2012). We argue here that this type of paradigm should not be overlooked by neuro-educators. Brain function with free-behaviour designs: There has been a new trend towards more ecologically valid neuroimaging experiments, which would ultimately engage neural circuits in real life conditions (Hasson and Honey, 2012; Maguire, 2012). This opens the possibility to investigate the neurobiology of cognition in more naturalistic contexts. Specifically, rather than looking at brain function with controlled pseudo-randomised brief stimulations that do not reflect how the brain works in real life conditions, these naturalistic designs can depict more realistic explanations of brain function. For instance, it is possible to investigate how brain networks are engaged in natural reading (Wang et al., 2015), listening to narrative stories (Huth et al., 2016), looking at natural scenes (Bartels and Zeki, 2004), and interacting in naturalistic social contexts (Deuse et al., 2016; Kinreich et al., 2017). Other studies have shown also the potential of those naturalistic approaches in studying atypical populations, including individuals with autism spectrum disorder (Rosenblau et al., 2016). Perhaps more interestingly, naturalistic approaches can be used with portable techniques such as EEG (Alday et al., 2017; Kinreich et al., 2017; Tromp et al., 2018) and other mobile technologies (Ladouce et al., 2017). For example, it has been possible to assess brain activity changes with EEG during live naturalistic social experiences (Jones et al., 2015), which opens new possibilities to map social brain development in early childhood by measuring brain activity in ecologically valid contexts. This ultimately offers an exciting opportunity for neuro-educators to look at brain function when subjects are learning and interacting within a real classroom environment (e.g. see (Dikker et al., 2017; Ko et al., 2017)). This can help for instance to shed light on how learners interact in group activities, mentalize about their peers and teachers, memorise facts, solve problems, respond to feedback, and react to different classroom management strategies. Some of these questions important to education can only be addressed relevantly in real-world contexts, hence the importance of looking at the brain with naturalistic approaches. Conclusion: To bridge the gap between neuroscience and education (Sousa, 2010), neuro-educators should consider this ever-growing neuroscience research that is studying the brain with ecologically valid naturalistic approaches. This provides a tremendous opportunity to examine cognitive processes in their natural context. Studying brain function with naturalistic designs should be encouraged in educational neuroscience, in particular given the recent sophistication of stimuli and data analysis methods. We believe that research with naturalistic approaches will add considerable value to existing cognitive neuroscience findings obtained with laboratory-based approaches.

References

Alday, P.M., Schlesewsky, M., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., 2017. Electrophysiology Reveals the Neural Dynamics of Naturalistic Auditory Language Processing: Event-Related Potentials Reflect Continuous Model Updates. eNeuro 4.
Bartels, A., Zeki, S., 2004. Functional brain mapping during free viewing of natural scenes. Hum Brain Mapp 21, 75-85.
Clark, V.P., 2012. A history of randomized task designs in fMRI. Neuroimage 62, 1190-1194.
Deuse, L., Rademacher, L.M., Winkler, L., Schultz, R.T., Gründer, G., Lammertz, S.E., 2016. Neural correlates of naturalistic social cognition: brain-behavior relationships in healthy adults. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 11, 1741-1751.
Dikker, S., Wan, L., Davidesco, I., Kaggen, L., Oostrik, M., McClintock, J., Rowland, J., Michalareas, G., Van Bavel, J.J., Ding, M., Poeppel, D., 2017. Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Tracks Real-World Dynamic Group Interactions in the Classroom. Curr Biol 27, 1375-1380.
Hasson, U., Honey, C.J., 2012. Future trends in Neuroimaging: Neural processes as expressed within real-life contexts. Neuroimage 62, 1272-1278.
Huth, A.G., de Heer, W.A., Griffiths, T.L., Theunissen, F.E., Gallant, J.L., 2016. Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature 532, 453-458.
Jones, E.J., Venema, K., Lowy, R., Earl, R.K., Webb, S.J., 2015. Developmental changes in infant brain activity during naturalistic social experiences. Dev Psychobiol 57, 842-853.
Josephs, O., Henson, R.N.A., 1999. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging: modelling, inference and optimization. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. 354, 1215-1228.
Kinreich, S., Djalovski, A., Kraus, L., Louzoun, Y., Feldman, R., 2017. Brain-to-Brain Synchrony during Naturalistic Social Interactions. Sci Rep 7, 17060.
Ko, L.W., Komarov, O., Hairston, W.D., Jung, T.P., Lin, C.T., 2017. Sustained Attention in Real Classroom Settings: An EEG Study. Front Hum Neurosci 11, 388.
Ladouce, S., Donaldson, D.I., Dudchenko, P.A., Ietswaart, M., 2017. Understanding Minds in Real-World Environments: Toward a Mobile Cognition Approach. Front Hum Neurosci 10, 694.
Lowe, M.J., 2012. The emergence of doing "nothing" as a viable paradigm design. Neuroimage 62, 1146-1151.
Maguire, E.A., 2012. Studying the freely-behaving brain with fMRI. Neuroimage 62, 1170-1176.
Rosenblau, G., Kliemann, D., Lemme, B., Walter, H., Heekeren, H.R., Dziobek, I., 2016. The role of the amygdala in naturalistic mentalising in typical development and in autism spectrum disorder. Br J Psychiatry 208, 556-564.
Sousa, D.A., 2010. Mind, Brain and Education: Neuroscience implications for the classroom. Solution Tree Press, Bloomington.
Tromp, J., Peeters, D., Meyer, A.S., Hagoort, P., 2018. The combined use of virtual reality and EEG to study language processing in naturalistic environments. Behav Res Methods (in press).
Visscher, K.M., Miezin, F.M., Kelly, J.E., Buckner, R.L., Donaldson, D.I., McAvoy, M.P., Bhalodia, V.M., Petersen, S.E., 2003. Mixed blocked/event-related designs separate transient and sustained activity in fMRI. Neuroimage 19, 1694-1708.
Wang, X., Yang, J., Yang, J., Mencl, W.E., Shu, H., Zevin, J.D., 2015. Language differences in the brain network for reading in naturalistic story reading and lexical decision. PLoS One 10, e0124388.

Keywords: Functional Neuroimaging, naturalistic stimuli, Brain Mapping, educational neuroscience, education and learning, fMRI, EEG

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

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Educational Neuroscience

Citation: Seghier ML, Habak C and Fahim MA (2018). Looking at the brain under naturalistic conditions: an opportunity for educational neuroscience. Conference Abstract: 3rd International Conference on Educational Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.225.00008

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: 27 Feb 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Dr. Mohamed L Seghier, Emirates College for Advanced Education, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Abu Dhabi, PO Box: 126662, United Arab Emirates, mseghier@gmail.com