The past decade has seen major advances in cognitive, affective and social neuroscience that have the potential to revolutionize educational theories about learning. The importance of emotion and social learning has long been recognized in education, but due to technological limitations in neuroscience research techniques, treatment of these topics in educational theory has largely not had the ...

BACKGROUND In the process of developing a professional medical expertise, goals can become a psychological impetus and act as a source of retaining an individual's persistency. Therefore, the goals of medical students should be considered when designing a curriculum for health professions. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine relative effects of goal categories on the value of lea...

Because culture requires transmission of information between individuals, thinking about the origin of culture has mainly focused on the genetic evolution of abilities for social learning. Current theory considers how social learning affects the adaptiveness of a single cultural trait, yet human culture consists of the accumulation of very many traits. Here we introduce a new modeling strategy ...

Reinforcement learning theory powerfully characterizes how we learn to benefit ourselves. In this theory, prediction errors-the difference between a predicted and actual outcome of a choice-drive learning. However, we do not operate in a social vacuum. To behave prosocially we must learn the consequences of our actions for other people. Empathy, the ability to vicariously experience and underst...

BACKGROUND There is rapidly increasing pressure to employ social media in medical education, but a review of the literature demonstrates that its value and role are uncertain. OBJECTIVE To determine if medical educators have a conceptual framework that informs their use of social media and whether this framework can be mapped to learning theory. METHODS Thirty-six participants engaged in an...

Social learning theory studies the mechanisms by which an agent learns from its interactions with conspecific agents. Examples of social learning can be found in the animal kingdom, and especially in primate societies, whereby, for instance, one agent learns new skills by the observation and imitation of another agent’s behaviour. At present there is no widely agreed definition of imitation exi...

Academics and other researchers regularly engage in strategic interactions— bargaining, cooperation, collaboration, etc. Given this strategic setting, we ask: how do the dynamics of social learning in epistemic communities influence outcomes of various actors? We focus, in particular, on minority groups in academia. As we show, evolutionary game theoretic models indicate that such actors may be...