You turn around slowly, heart racing, sweat beading, and…
A tiny black pug, no bigger than your hand, is backing slowly away across a lawn three yards away, barking up a storm but retreating and shaking as it goes.
You laugh, and carry on, not realising that you just learned something. What just happened, you see, was a prediction error.
“The immediate effect of this prediction error is to update our belief from thinking there is a big dog to there being a tiny dog,” explains Peter Kok, a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL). “The more long-term effect is that we update our model of the world: loud barks don’t always come from big dogs.”
In neuroscience, a so-called “prediction error” occurs when an expected event fails to materialise. Such incidents cause a range of metacognitive functions to leap into action that force us to re-examine our initial flawed expectations and ask ourselves what we can learn from our errors.
Floris de Lange, a professor at the Radboud University in the Netherlands, reveals that prediction errors can arise from a number of different brain stimuli. They can be sensory – for example, a visual surprise such as a sudden flash; or they can even be semantic. He gives an example of the sentence “the soup was too hot to cry” – the last word elicits surprise because our brains had predicted a different end.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 27, 2018 من TES.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 27, 2018 من TES.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Try not to get hung up on linguistic convention, chic@s
Languages are like water – they take the easiest route. And, like gender, they are fluid. That is why, as world languages evolve to reflect cultural change, a revolution is under way in the use of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ terms, writes Heather Martin
Three simple psychology tips for better behaviour
When a pupil is acting up, their motivations are often hidden from view. It’s possible that teachers themselves are partially at fault for setting the wrong tone in their interaction with others, writes Lekha Sharma, who suggests ways to remodel a school culture
This research could be music to your ears…
Schools should resist putting additional time and resources into yet more English and maths lessons and instead give children’s learning a research-evidenced boost by encouraging them to join a band or an orchestra, says Martin Leigh
Minority (school) report
Predictive technology – powered by increasingly complex algorithms – is finding its way into schools, promising to pre-empt misbehaviour, violence or mental health issues before they happen. But does it work, and is its use ethical, asks Simon Creasey
Giving school a spin again
In a bid to improve parental engagement, one Edinburgh school is putting parents in their children’s shoes to experience a typical modern school day – and the results are breathtaking, finds Emma Seith
Averting Pupils' Social Stigma By ‘Poverty Proofing'
Do your school policies unintentionally ‘out’ children from disadvantaged backgrounds? One charity says such occurrences are all too common and have proposed ‘poverty proofing’ as the solution. Lucy Edkins investigates
A Plant-Based Diet Of Learning
Aware of the mental health benefits of green-fingered working, Nigel Cox helped to set up an outreach course at his college to support people recovering from substance abuse and other personal challenges
Social And Emotional Skills In The Early Years
Children who are able to focus their attention, manage their behaviour and interact positively with others from a young age experience better learning outcomes later in life, finds Irena Barker
How Centralised Detentions Get Pupils' Attention
By adopting a consistent whole-school approach to rewards and sanctions, we achieved a marked improvement in attitudes to learning – and reduced teachers’ workload, says Calvin Robinson
Homework Truths
With some studies claiming that homework has little or no impact on pupil achievement, schools have been tempted to cut back on it or ban it altogether. But we shouldn’t write homework off, warn two gurus of UK education research. Steve Higgins and Lee Elliot Major argue that the evidence on homework has been misrepresented – and out-of-school study can, in fact, have a major impact on learning outcomes
