The Neuroscience of the 'Transfer Problem' - Part 2

The 'transfer problem' should not be a surprise. It's central to how the brain operates.
Published in Neuroscience
The Neuroscience of the 'Transfer Problem' - Part 2
Like

In the previous column I introduced the ‘transfer problem’ — the ability to apply knowledge learned in one context into another — as a central challenge in education. I suggested that the context-dependent organisation of brain function and activity means that the transfer of information between contexts is by no means inevitable; indeed it is likely to be the exception rather than the rule. This is due to the fact that we only ever construct ‘partial representations’ of the world around us, representations which are inextricably linked to the learning environment they were created in. I offered 4 levels through which the activity of the brain is constrained by the context in which it occurs:

1 The neural context – ‘encellment

2 The network context – ‘embrainment

3 The bodily context – ‘embodiment

4 The social context – ‘ensocialment

This post will examine the first two of these, and how this context-dependence may be relevant to the transfer problem and education more broadly.

1 Neural context – ‘encellment

The cellular neighbours of a neuron exert a large influence over its eventual function as a processor of information. The characteristics of its response and the way in which it connects and influences other neurons is in turn dependent on the type and amount of activity that the neuron itself receives. On a simple level this can be demonstrated by the foundational principle of neuroscience, paraphrasing Donald Hebb, that “cells that wire together fire together”. The more that cells communicate with each other, the more that their connections are strengthened, and the greater influence that a preceding cell exerts over the activity of subsequent cell. However, the context-dependence of neural activity is not limited to the simple co-operative strengthening of connections. They can also compete. Many areas of the brain show competition between different neurons within the same region. Competition between cells is thought to be crucial for creating specialisation (such as cells which respond only to particular orientations in visual cortex), but it can also have more drastic effects. A famous example comes from Hubel and Wiesel’s (1963) Nobel Prize-winning work on the cat visual cortex. They found that newborn cats who had one eye occluded for a time (and then reopened) showed reduced space dedicated to processing information from the occluded eye and increased space processing than from the uncovered eye. As other structures earlier in the visual system still functioned normally after the re-opening (e.g. retinal ganglion cells and the lateral geniculate nucleus – the relay station to the visual cortex), the conclusion was that these changes were the result of activity-based competition between neurons, with the diminished input from the eye at a competitive disadvantage to input from other sources. This disadvantage eventually leads to visual processing being outcompeted, and other functions expanding to occupy the territory.

What does this mean for transfer?

How any neuron responds to an input is constrained by a number of different factors: the ever-changing strengths of connections to potentially thousands of other inputs (both excitatory and inhibitory), competition (or co-operation) between neighbouring cells, and a progressive specialisation of the cell’s function. This means that a signal from a neuron can only be interpreted as representing that cell’s response to a particular set of circumstances at that specific time: the neural context, if you will.

Another consequence of the reliance of each neuron’s activity on so many of its neighbours is that this means that any information that is encoded by the neuron is likely to be done in a distributed fashion, across large groups of neurons. Such ‘distributed representations’, whilst more robust on the face of damage and brain changes, are also far more likely to be ‘partial representations’, relying as they do on numerous small contributions from different neural sources. They will never capture a concept or an idea in its entirety. Instead, they record a blurred snapshot of some of the key details approximating the concept: a partial representation.

2. Network context – ‘embrainment’

Just as individual neurons can be affected by the context in which they find themselves, so entire brain areas can co-operate, compete and change function as a result of their context within the brain as a whole. On a larger scale than that noticed by Hubel and Wiesel, Cohen et al (1997) found that in people who have been blind from an early age, visual cortex begins to take over other functions entirely, such as touch when reading braille. Similarly, if you re-route visual information into a ferret auditory cortex, the area will begin to respond to different orientation patterns from the visual scene outside (Sur and Leamey, 2001), as normally happens in visual cortex. In less drastic fashion, maturation in the brain involves the progressive specialisation of many different brain areas, which gradually take over sole control of functions that initially call upon wider networks of regions. Again, this process can be categorised by competition, with one area gradually coming to exert a dominant influence over a particular kind of processing. Good examples of these sorts of processes have been found in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) during adolescence, such as the inferior frontal gyrus for response inhibition or the rostrolateral PFC for relational reasoning (see Dumontheil, 2016 for a review of these and others).

What does this mean for transfer?

Most formal education takes place during periods of rapid brain development and maturation. Brain areas are progressively specialising and refining their functions, dependent on their relationship to other brain areas and input from the outside world. In this context, the distributed and partial representations that we build of the world are likely to be highly context-dependent, not only on the particular pattern of inputs, but also on the time and stage of development in which the information was learned.

In the next post I will examine two further contextual levels which can contribute to the domain-specificity of knowledge representations in the brain, namely:

3 The bodily context – ‘embodiment

4 The social context – ‘ensocialment

Next post here.

These posts are adapted from a version which originally appeared on my personal blog.

Please sign in or register for FREE

If you are a registered user on Research Communities by Springer Nature, please sign in