Learning - Page 7 of 7

Emotion, Learning, Attention and Perception

If you were forced at gunpoint to choose the part of the brain that plays the most important role in emotion, you might well plump for the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe, roughly in the centre of the brain. While certainly not the only structure involved in emotional processes, it is the most extensively researched. Generally speaking, the amygdala is thought to play a role in mediating cognitive responses to emotional stimuli. Phelps (2006), in an Annual Review of Psychology article, provides an overview of the findings that have emerged.

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Learning by example

On a similar theme to yesterday’s post comes this article by well-known psychologist Alison Gopnick. Its kernal is that kids learn better by imitating and refining what someone is showing them. She likens this method of learning to the way that a sports teacher might demonstrate a sport.

This effective method of learning is not normally employed for academic subjects. They tend to use ‘routinized learning’ method. This is a similar process to explicit learning, mentioned yesterday. There is simply not enough emphasis on the implicit methods of learning.

Imagine if you could watch a maths teacher trying to solve a problem they’d never seen before and explaining how they worked it out. Imagine if you could watch an English teacher trying to write an answer to an essay question about Shakespeare. Gopnik calls this ‘guided discovery’.

> From The New York Times