Mate Marote: Interacting with children's minds

GOLDIN, ANDREA; WINOGRAD, MILENA; ELÍAS COSTA, MARTÍN; BRUNO, CRISTIAN; LIPINA, SEBASTIÁN; SIGMAN, MARIANO

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; I Reunión Conjunta de Neurociencias (IRCN). XI Taller Argentino de Neurociencias. XVII Reunión de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (SAN); 2009

During a person´s life, but specially during infancy and childhood, the brain is a plasticorgan changed by the environment and the way the person interacts with it. And educationis a very important part of it. In this sense, cortical changes can be related to cognitivechanges, bringing the oportunity to relate mind, brain and education. A new disciplinestudying this subject exists not so far ago: neuroeducation, combining cognitiveneuroscience and behavioral methods to investigate the development of mentalrepresentations and, possibly, to use neuroscience pre-existing knowledge to improvedifferent teaching approaches.During the last two years we have been developing “Mate Marote”, a cognitive trainereducational software to exercise different aspects of cognition in order to understand itsoverall and specific impact –for each cognitive demand: control, self- monitoring, andexploration -, and its transfer to other cognitive processing and academic performance. Theultimate goal of this project is to generate a free, enjoyable and actually easily accessiblesoftware in order to optimize learning and cognitive skills in school-age children withbroad performance range and different socioeconomic backgrounds. We present the firstpreliminary results: 1) An increase in working memory capacitites, and 2) Identification ofaction plans in complex games, whic h allow to identify and train planning strategies. Wediscuss future challenges of the project and how to asses whether results transfer to otherlearning environments, and particularly to school performance.