The teaching and the learning brain: A cortical hemodynamic marker of teacher–student interactions in the Socratic dialog

By L. Holper, A. Goldin, Diego E. Shalom, A. Battro, Martin Wolf, Mariano Sigman. 2013

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The study aimed to step into two-person (teacher–student) educational neuroscience. We describe a physiological marker of cortical hemodynamic correlates involved in teacher–student interactions during performance of a classical teaching model, the Socratic dialog. We recorded prefrontal brain activity during dialog execution simultaneously in seventeen teacher–student pairs using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our main finding is that students, who successfully transferred the knowledge, showed less activity than those who not showed transfer. Correlation analysis between teacher and student activity indicate that in successful educational dialogs student and teachers ‘dance at the same pace’. This is the first study measuring simultaneously brain activity of teacher–student interactions and paves future investigations of brain networks involved in complex educational interactions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a74a98fb4767a6955ae928ba7e72caaa82e3f447

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Felix Scholkmann
2. Martin Wolf
3. Marco Ferrari
4. Valentina Quaresima

Citations in the corpus

• Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) for Assessing Cerebral Cortex Function During Human Behavior in Natural/Social Situations: A Concise Review (2019, methodology): “Previously, Holper et al. (2013) recorded prefrontal brain oxygenation during dialog execution simultaneously in 17 teacher-student pairs using a four-channel wireless fNIRS prototype.”
• A review on continuous wave functional near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging instrumentation and methodology (2014, background): “…measure brain activity without being constrained by cables also offers studying novel paradigms, such as hyperscanning, i.e. the analysis of the interaction of brain activity between subjects through measuring simultaneously in two or more subjects (Dommer et al., 2012; Holper et al., 2012, 2013).”