Mate Marote: Interacting with children’s minds

GOLDIN, ANDREA; WINOGRAD, MILENA; COSTA, MARTÍN ELÍAS; BRUNO, CRISTIAN; LIPINA, SEBASTIAN J.; SIGMAN, MARIANO

Córdoba

Congreso; Taller Argentino de Neurociencias 2009; 2009

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencia

Learning something properly involves neural changes and reconnections, among other processes. Throughout life, but especially during infancy and childhood, the brain is continuously changed by the environment and the way the person interacts with it (plasticity). And education is a very important part in this process. In this sense, cortical changes can be related to cognitive changes, bringing the opportunity to relate mind, brain and education. A new discipline studying this subject exists not so far ago: neuroeducation, combining cognitive neuroscience and behavioral methods to investigate the development of mental representations and, possibly, to use neuroscience pre-existing knowledge to improve different teaching approaches. During the last five to ten years, some neuroscientists begun to design and implement tasks directed to promote and optimize cognitive development. As brains are built over time, early educational investments can build foundational skills and contribute to prevent later learning difficulties (particularly, highly specialized interventions are needed as early as possible for children experiencing different kind of stress, as violence, poverty, malnutrition and social exclusion). From a Ppiagetian perspective, brain architecture is built in a hierarchical, “bottom-up” sequence: higher capacities are more difficult to develop if lower capacities have not emerged appropriately. In this sense, a balanced approach to emotional, social, cognitive, and language development will best prepare children for success in school and later in the workplace, as are critical for human development and quality of life. At the Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa (LNI) we are developing “Mate Marote”, a cognitive trainer educational software to exercise different aspects of cognition in order to understand its overall and specific impact –for each cognitive demand: control, self-monitoring, and exploration–, and its transfer to other cognitive processing and academic performance. The ultimate goal of this project is to generate a free, enjoyable and actually easily accessible software in order to optimize learning and cognitive skills in school-age children (five to eight years old) with broad performance range and different socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the first neuroeducational approach to understand the interaction and synergy of various cognitive skills (planning, working memory, inhibitory and executive control, and arithmetics), and its possibility to transfer to other learning environments, and specifically to school performance. Particularly, solving all our games imply learning a best strategy to do it, and be aware of that, as consciously the learning is better and longerlasting. In addition, the games are fun for the kids, as more motivation is proved to augment the time and attention spent on the task, this way improving the achievement. Here we show some of the first very encouraging results we are getting.