A team of researchers from the Institute of Neurosciences at Princeton University (USA) has discovered how the brain determines what is important when making decisions in our day to day life. Their findings could contribute to improving teaching and learning, as well as the treatment of mental disorders and addictions , in which people’s perspectives are dysfunctional or fractured.
Scientists studied how we learn to pay attention to according to what things to learn more effectively, that is, to make the most of life experiences, assuming that in real life situations most of what happens is irrelevant and we should not learn nothing about it. For example, when you order something new in a restaurant, such as an anchovy pizza, you should learn whether or not you like anchovy pizza, rather than attributing the pleasant experience to the table you are sitting at. Another equally clearer example: when we cross the street, we must pay attention to the direction and speed of the approaching traffic and not to the shape or colors of the cars.
Participants in the study performed a trial-and-error multidimensional learning task, while the researchers scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Thus they discovered that selective attention was used to determine the value of different options. The results also showed that selective attention shapes what we learn when something unexpected happens.
Returning to the example of pizza, if – once tasted – it is better or worse than expected, we attribute the learning to the characteristics that we focus on in principle and not those that we decide to ignore.
Therefore, what we learn through this process teaches us to know what to pay attention to, creating a feedback loop:
“If we want to understand learning, we cannot ignore the fact that learning is almost always done in a multidimensional messy environment. We want the children to listen to the teacher, but there is a lot of noise in the classroom, there is so much to look inside and outside. from the window … so it’s important to understand exactly how attention and learning interact and how they shape each other, “says Yael Niv, leader of the work.
The next thing will be to delve into how we choose to pay attention to the environment to maximize what we learn from each experience, and what processes shape those internal decisions about what we should attend to.
The study has been published in the journal Neuron.
