Biological Foundations of Learning Enhancement—Translational Issues in Science of Learning

• In Event: 3-126 - Understanding and Empowering Student Learning and Development: From Cognitive Neuroscience Lab to student learning promotion

Integrative Statement

Today’s children live in a rapidly changing world. How to enhance learning to enable successful adaptation to the changing environment becomes a major challenge to academics as well as policy makers, educators, and parents. In the last decade or so, scientific investigators have studied learning as a process that can be observed at multiple levels from the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, resulting in a new scientific discipline known as the Science of Learning, a highly cross-disciplinary field of study. Studies of individual learners during formal and informal learning at school and home settings as well as in the laboratory have provided much information about the process of human learning at the level of behavior. In contrast, the study of learning process at neuronal and synaptic levels are mostly performed through animal studies, providing insights into the biological foundations of learning and the enhancement of learning.
Here I present a theoretical framework for understanding how early life environment, including both the maternal characteristics and non-maternal environmental novelty, jointly shape the learning capacity of the developing individual across various domains of learning (from spatial memory, social memory, associative to non-associative learning) and across levels of analysis (from synaptic plasticity and its modulation by stress hormone, to the self-regulation of stress hormone, to learning observed through behavior). Through this framework, I will discuss three issues in “translating” conclusions obtained from animal model to those applicable to human learning: (1) from highly controlled and low dimensional world of laboratories to highly variable and high-dimensional world of the real life settings, (2) from a few limited learning paradigms to the much richer real world learning scenarios, which may or may not be readily captured by these paradigms, and (3) across different internal biological context such as the internal state of the biological individual, including the brain and its on-going neuro-dynamics.

In discussing these translational issues, I will discuss evidence obtained from our own cross-life span longitudinal studies of the laboratory rats and from our effort in developing high-density EEG based brain imaging for observing the learning brain in the highly noisy real world settings. Through our rodent cognitive neuroscience studies, we demonstrated that various domains of learning can be systematically enhanced through temporally brief (not necessarily time consuming) and inexpensive (not necessarily requires continuing supply of new toys) early environmental construction. We demonstrated that the mothers’ ability to regulate her own stress hormone and the reliability of her own behavioral patterns can modulate both the amplitude and direction of the learning enhancement effects. In human high-density EEG studies, we demonstrated that through the use of advanced signal processing techniques, particularly the use of Second Order Blind Identification, (1) single-trial ERPs from specific brain regions, instead of EEG electrodes, can be measured to enable single-trial based classifications of different experimental conditions; (2) such single-trial ERPs can be measured during continuing free eye movement as in video-game playing; (3) resting state activities of specific brain regions can be extracted with millisecond resolution.

Author

• Akaysha Tang, The University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author