Recent discoveries in neuroscience are prompting us to rethink some of our previous ideas about learning. Such is the case with the role of emotions in cognition and learning and their interrelationship with rational thought. Not only can emotions help or hinder learning, but they are also crucial to the development of “skilled” or “academic” intuitions. The social dimension of learning is another reality that is interwoven with this emotional dimension and can no longer be ignored. This new data is ready to take its place in the field, and researchers are making remarkable efforts to popularize it.
This is the case of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Associate Professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience, in her book ” Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience.” For the benefit of all those interested in learning, let’s see how Immordino-Yang and her colleague Matthias Faeth bring these fascinating discoveries to light in the chapter entitled “The Role of Emotion and Skilled Intuition in Learning” and how these can be enriched by the insights of Olivier Houdé, a specialist in cognitive development and learning.

The importance of emotions revealed by neuroscience

Long-held beliefs that rational thought and emotions were diametrically opposed and that emotions should be suppressed for effective learning and decision-making are being challenged. A significant revelation from neuroscience is the pivotal role of emotions in cognition and learning. This understanding, championed by Antonio Damasio, a prominent Portuguese-American physician and professor of neurology, neuroscience and psychology, is a game-changer. In his book ‘L’école du cerveau,’ Olivier Houdé, a leading expert in cognitive development and learning, succinctly summarizes these advances:

“On the question of emotions, neuroscience has […] provided analyses of unparalleled precision, notably the work of neurologist Damasio […]. There are well-identified circuits in the human brain whose function is the emotional guidance of learning and decision-making. More specifically, in the so-called paralimbic cortex, i.e. around the limbic system (cortex of emotions such as joy, pleasure or fear), there is a region […] called the prefrontal cortex. This region, analyzed by Damasio (1995, 1999, 2017), enables us to assign different weights of positive or negative valence to the various solutions open to us so that the cerebral landscape in which our trial-and-error learning takes place always includes an emotional relief.”

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, associate professor of education, psychology and neuroscience, who has collaborated with Antonio Damasio, among others, is the author of a book entitled “Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience,” in which she discusses from various angles the potential of discoveries in affective and social neuroscience for learning. This potential is ready for practical application, as she points out, along with neuropsychological researcher Matthias Faeth, in the chapter entitled ” The Role of Emotion and Skilled Intuition in Learning”:

“Advances in neuroscience have been increasingly used to inform educational theory and practice. However, while the most successful strides forward have been made in the areas of academic disciplinary skills such as reading and mathematical processing, a great deal of new evidence from social and affective neuroscience is prime for application to education (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007; Immordino-Yang & Fischer, 2009). In particular, social and affective neuroscience are revealing more than ever before the importance of emotion in guiding successful learning and the critical role of teachers in managing the social environment of the classroom so that optimal emotional and cognitive learning can take place (vanGeert & Steenbeek, 2008). The message from social and affective neuroscience is clear: no longer can we think of learning as separate from or disrupted by emotion, and no longer can we focus only at the level of the individual student in analyzing good strategies for classroom instruction. Students and teachers are socially interacting and learning from one another in ways that cannot be done justice by examining only the “cold” cognitive aspects of academic skills. Like other forms of learning and interacting, building academic knowledge involves integrating emotion and cognition in a social context. Academic skills are “hot,” not “cold”!”

Whether due to a lack of understanding of this body of knowledge, a reluctance to embrace neuroscience or a resistance to change, the integration of these discoveries into the educational environment is slow. “A rich body of recent neuroscience has demonstrated the interrelatedness of emotions and cognition and the importance of emotion in rational tough (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001; Immordino-Yang, 2008). Yet, much of contemporary educational practice considers emotion as ancillary or even as interfering with learning”, note the two authors. Although much remains to be discovered on the subject, we can be delighted that we finally have reliable data on the mechanisms and interrelationships that govern so-called “rational” thinking, emotions and learning. This data encourages us to reconsider certain pedagogical approaches that have been anchored in our practices for generations and which, as we now know, are based on a partially erroneous vision of our learning mechanisms.

The Iowa Gambling Task paradigm

To explore the role of emotion and “skilled” intuitions (we’ll come back to this concept later) in learning and thus better guide teaching practice, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Matthias Faeth didn’t turn to direct studies of brain mechanisms. Instead, they chose to interpret the results of a body of neuroscientific research using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) paradigm (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 2005). By enabling the analysis of emotional and bodily signals during learning, this well-known neuroscience paradigm has advanced our understanding of the role of emotions in cognition. Designed by Antoine Bechara and colleagues, it enables us to study the decision-making of patients with normal cognitive abilities, who score well on IQ tests but have damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region that bridges the gap between bodily feelings during emotion and the learning of cognitive strategies.

In the original IGT studies, participants (those with impairment and those in the control group who are healthy) are asked to choose a card from four decks, with each card potentially making them win or lose money. Over the course of the test, participants experience both good and bad games. While, like healthy participants, patients with ventromedial prefrontal syndrome are able to distinguish between their good and bad plays and feel consistent emotions in connection with them, they fail to learn and thus end up making more profitable gambling choices.

“The […] Iowa Gambling Task has been used by Antoine Bechara and his collaborators to demonstrate that as people learn about a new task, they accrue subtle emotional markers of success and failure-in effect, embodied implicit memories or “somatic markers”. These memories come to steer subsequent behaviour, making individuals avoid situations and choices that previously resulted in failure. Subconscious “hunches” at first, over time, people can become explicitly aware of the rules governing the game. Though both patients and healthy participants eventually infer the rules and learn to predict which moves will be risky and which will be safer, only the healthy participants can use these predictions to advantageously steer their subsequent choices,” explain Immordino-Yang and Faeth, bluntly concluding that ” what this means for the interaction of emotion and cognition is that factual knowledge alone is useless without a guiding emotional intuition.” It should be noted that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex experience the repercussions of this difficulty in learning from their experiences on a daily basis, whereas this was not the case prior to their brain injury.

From emotions to “skilled” intuition

This emotional intuition, which Immordino-Yang and Faeth also describe as “skilled “or “smart academic “intuition, and which is lacking in IGT patients, is therefore crucial to learning. “In effect, efficient learners build useful and relevant “intuitions” that guide their thinking and decision-making (Damasio, 1994/2005; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). These intuitions integrate their emotional reactions with their cognitive processing and incorporate what has been learned from experience. These intuitions are not randomly generated nonconscious whims—critically, because they are shaped and organized by experience with a task or domain, they are specific and relevant to the particular contexts in which they are learned,” argue the two authors. “From a neuroscientific perspective, intuition can be understood as the incorporation of the nonconscious emotional signal into the knowledge being acquired,” they add.

It could be argued that since cases of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are rare, the IGT paradigm cannot really shed any light on the functioning of the majority of learners. This is not the case, according to Immordino-Yang and Faeth:

“And students in a classroom struggle with very much the same problem: if they feel no connection to the knowledge they learn in school, the academic content will seem emotionally meaningless to them; even if they manage to regurgitate the factual information, it will lay barren and without any influence on their decisions and behaviour. Sure, unlike the ventromedial prefrontal patients, they have the capacity to develop emotional reactions to the material they learn. But if the design of the curriculum does not allow the teachers to support the development of emotional reactions, if emotions are not taken seriously when occur and are not given appropriate room to influence decisions and thinking in the classroom, then the effective integration of emotion and cognition in learning will be compromised just as it is for the group of patients. For good cognition to manifest in the classroom and beyond, emotions need to be an honoured part of the learning experience all along.”

More concretely, as the learners manipulate knowledge in a given task or domain, their relationship to these experiences becomes emotionally coloured: “[…] emotional reactions to the outcomes of their behavioural choices become implicitly attached to the cognitive knowledge about the domain—here, either class or math or essay writing. These academic activities are no longer neutral to the learner; they become “risky” and uncomfortable or else exciting and challenging, depending in part on the learner’s emotional interpretation of the outcome. In each of these examples, the learner’s emotional reaction to the outcome of his efforts consciously or nonconsciously shapes his future behaviour, inciting him either to behave in the same way the next time or to be wary of situations that are similar,” explain the two authors.

As described by Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio (2007), the role of emotion in learning is one of guidance, comparable to that of the rudder of a ship or aircraft. “We argue that, although its influence during learning may not be openly visible, emotion stabilizes the direction of a learner’s decisions and behaviours over time, helping the learner to steer toward strategies that have worked well in similar situations in the past. In this way, implicit emotional memories are an integral part of learning and thinking,” say Immordino-Yang and Faeth.

The teacher: a motivator of emotions

It’s clear that the teacher has a key role to play in helping learners access the emotional dimension that leads to the development of skilled intuitions. If academic skills are not “cold”, but “hot”, it’s partly because they take place in a social context in which learners and teachers interact with each other – and are themselves shaped by their own cultural and social experiences. In addition, social emotions play a key role in learning, particularly empathy, the mechanism by which the learner is able to decode the teacher’s actions.

In his book “L’école du cerveau”, Olivier Houdé uses the expression “teacher (or instigator) of emotions” to qualify the role that every teacher would gain from taking on, in addition to that of transmitting academic knowledge: “There is no longer any doubt today, in view of Damasio’s work, that emotion, individual or collective, preferably positive (fear being detrimental to learning; Allen & Monyer, 2013; Donato et al.., 2013), linked to active engagement, curiosity, feedback and error correction, is a very good guide to intelligence in the brain. Teachers should, therefore, not only teach mathematics, French, history, geography, but also be teachers (or inciters) of emotions.” For Houdé, active engagement, curiosity, feedback (simple feedback or neuro-feedback) and error correction are essential because “they awaken emotion” in learners’ brains.

Let’s take a moment to summarize these concepts and give a few interesting details about them. Active engagement and feedback are, respectively, the second and third of the four pillars of learning highlighted by neuropsychologist Stanislas Dehaene, the first pillar being attention, and the fourth is consolidation. For Dehaene (2018), active engagement is about “maximizing curiosity and active prediction”. Note that the key concepts involved in learning, as demonstrated by neuroscience, are interrelated to each other, as also evidenced by this description of the actively engaged learner by Olivier Houdé:

“When active, the child or adult makes predictions, thinks about an answer, anticipates it before it is given. In this way, situations in which the student is surprised by an answer or result that they did not expect are conducive to learning. What’s more, when it represents a personal challenge or an emotion, it’s easier to inhibit the automatisms (heuristics) that lead to error (Houdé et al., 2001, for a demonstration using brain imaging). Action, trial and error and emotions, therefore, play important roles in learning.

The feeling of surprise described by Houdé is far from being a frivolous element. Let’s start by recalling that surprise is one of the six fundamental emotions – observed in all humans – along with joy, fear, anger, sadness and disgust (Ekman, 1984, 1992a, 1992b). At the root of our brain’s learning mechanism, as now understood by cognitive science, lies the “surprise signal,” better known as the “error signal.”

“According to the current theory of the so-called Bayesian or statistician brain (Tenenbaum et al., 2011), the fundamental mechanism that enables us to learn from an initial internal cognitive model is the calculation of the difference between the reward expected or hoped for by the student (for example, thinking they had answered a question correctly in class) and the one actually received (the answer was wrong or not precise enough). This difference is called the error signal (Schultz et al., 1997, 2016; Waelti et al., 2011),” explains Houdé.

Reward (dopaminergic) circuits in the brain are directly linked to error signals (Gruber et al., 2014; Schultz, 2016). For these dopaminergic circuits to be activated, error signals need to be targeted, adjusted according to progress, given regularly and with socio-emotional benevolence (Changeux, 2002; Wise, 2004). The reaction of surprise induced by an error signal enables us to detach ourselves quickly from an unanticipated situation and reposition ourselves to deal with it. At the physiological level, it leads to cognitive overactivity, accompanied by a surge in adrenalin, which prepares the body to react with agility, as is the case in stressful situations.

The United Nations describes curiosity as the “engine of academic success”: “Curiosity is a genuine desire for knowledge and the motivation to actively seek out new information. Curiosity drives learning and motivation, fosters empathy and aids critical thinking, decision making, and relationship skills, and is key to life satisfaction and health.” Teachers have every interest in cultivating this emotion in their learners, as Olivier Houdé notes: “We also know that teaching that is too explicit kills curiosity (Bonawitz et al., 2011). This student curiosity, which is valuable for neuropedagogy, is also validated in brain imaging (Kang et al. 2009), as well as in babies as one of the very first drivers of human learning from the surprise of violating expectations (Stahl and Feigenson, 2015) […].”

Let’s add that the degree of difficulty of the task proposed to the learner is a crucial element in preventing them from becoming demotivated by failures that are too severe or too frequent, or by too little challenge. “It is preferable […] that the task be neither too easy (no errors) nor too difficult (too many errors and not enough success to anchor curiosity and progress, see Gottlieb et al., 2013; Kaplan and Oudeyer, 2007 for a simulation in developmental robotics)”, mentions Houdé.

Feedback and error correction are two further interdependent concepts. The learner whose knowledge is being formatively tested needs to receive feedback on his or her answers, ideally immediately and in detail – which is, of course, more feasible with e-learning. As you can see, without feedback, there can be no error signal, no surprises and no error correction. Error correction is obviously required to prevent learners from encoding incorrect answers in their long-term memory, making them more difficult to unlearn.

While so-called “negative” feedback – that which aims to correct – is essential, positive feedback – that which consists in highlighting successes – should by no means be neglected. Indeed, it has been found that it is the latter that leads to the greatest activation of the striatum, the small nerve structure below the cortex that forms an integral part of the brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine in particular (DePasque and Tricomi, 2014). The more successful a learner is, the more his or her reward system is activated, releasing dopamine, and the resulting sense of pleasure and satisfaction reinforces the behaviour in question.

Feedback, therefore, has not only an informative but also a motivational role. The same study also observed that the reward system is further stimulated when the challenge taken up is perceived as being more difficult (without being too arduous) rather than too easy. Numerous empirical studies have demonstrated the link between better performance and a more challenging task—within the competence limits of the individual performing it—(Locke and Latham, 2002; Latham, 2007; Latham and Locke, 2007).

Olivier Houdé distinguishes two types of feedback: “simple feedback” and “neuro-feedback”. The first concept refers to typical feedback, whether from others (teacher or otherwise), whether automatically generated in e-learning, or from the learner, who can correct his or her own responses. The second, lesser-known concept, which has been around for a few decades, is a method of training oneself to self-regulate brain activity in real-time. It is based on neuroplasticity (or cerebral plasticity), the brain’s extraordinary capacity to restructure itself. In such a session, a brain imaging device records changes in the subject’s brain waves, and the subject receives this data in feedback loops, online, as an image on the screen, or as a sound or tactile signal. Although it’s commonplace these days to monitor one’s body activity using connected devices, Houdé doesn’t advocate integrating neuro-feedback into the classroom. Nevertheless, given its effectiveness (Sitaram et al., 2017), he believes it would be wise to draw inspiration from it: “We can […] only encourage teachers, in the real social context of the classroom, to invent pedagogical practices that simulate as closely as possible this effect of neuro-feedback, self-awareness or self-regard […].”

To become emotional inciters, teachers need to grant learners the right to make mistakes and design their activities with this in mind, encouraging trial and error, experimentation, reflection and recourse to intuitive knowledge. “In general, teachers should stive to design activities that create space – space for emotional reactions to appear, along with space to safely make mistakes and learn from them. […] In times of standardized testing and curricula packed to the brim, it might sound like sacrilege, but from an affective neuroscientific perspective, the direct and seemingly most efficient path turns out to be inefficient, leading too often to heaps of factual knowledge poorly integrated into and therefore ineffective for students’ real lives,” defend Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Matthias Faeth.

Although we are predisposed to learn from our mistakes, numerous studies show that we have a lot of difficulty embracing this predisposition, partly because we are socialized to have an aversion to error. To counter this tendency and maximize the chances that learners feel comfortable “taking risks,” the teacher must emphasize the pedagogical benefits of error and integrate them into their teaching. A study (Käfer et al., 2019) has highlighted that positively modifying the perception of errors, both for teachers and learners, can promote success and motivation. Particularly regarding motivation, the common perception of students showed superior effects compared to their individual perceptions. In this regard, the teacher can have a significant influence on their class.

Strategies to Foster Emotional Engagement

The vision of Immordino-Yang and Faeth described above is part of the strategies they propose to teachers to foster meaningful learning that integrates emotions. One strategy involves encouraging the development of intelligent academic intuitions.

“Once a topic is chosen, teachers should encourage their students to use their own intuitions when engaging in learning and problem-solving activities in the classroom. […] Students must be offered adequate chances for the development and feeling of experience-based intuitions about how and when to use the academic material: “Is the use of this mathematical procedure warranted in this instance?” “Am I getting closer to the correct solution?” […]. Students’ private (or collective) reflections on questions such as these are critical to the development of useful, generalizable, memorable knowledge. And, at their base, answering these questions requires integrating emotional with cognitive knowledge to produce skilled intuitions – the kind of intuitions that will transfer to other academic and real-life situations.”

Among the other strategies suggested by Immordino-Yang and Faeth, the idea of supporting the development of an emotional connection with the learning material is paramount. Offering learners the chance to choose the subject themselves or involving them in the design of the exercise is a way to encourage a sense of belonging to the subject matter and help them better understand the purpose of the exercise. One can also opt for a subject or angle related to the realities and interests of the learners or propose the resolution of open problems, which gives learners maximum space for “their intuitive knowledge regarding relevance, familiarity, creativity, and interest in the process (Albin, 2008).” Finally, group work, projects, or portfolios are also good choices, even if they generally require more guidance from the teacher.

The classroom climate is an essential factor for making possible what we have just discussed and, more broadly, for creating a space conducive to the emergence of emotional reactions. First, the teacher must establish a positive climate. Humour and play, even with adults, if handled skillfully, can be a valuable tool for breaking the ice, creating a warm environment, and promoting relational security in a classroom, whether in person or online.

Humour, in particular, can be a double-edged sword. To get the best out of it and avoid the worst, it is wise to follow some principles: favour benevolent humour and refrain from entering the realm of mockery, sarcasm, irony, or so-called “malicious” joy; never direct the humorous act at a learner; use humour only to highlight key concepts; avoid excess: limit to three or four humorous examples per hour; adjust the level of humour deployed according to the situation; do not use humour before or during an exam, as it may disturb more anxious learners; favour “neutral” humour, thus avoiding humour on taboo or sensitive subjects that could create embarrassing situations or a feeling of injustice in class; and finally, if the teacher is not comfortable with humour, it is better to abstain!

”And indeed, a carefully timed dose of humour or incentive can certainly help students to belong, say Immordino-Yang and Faeth. Such activities can also go a long way in helping students to feel safe in expressing and learning from their mistakes, and in building social cohesion among the students and between the students and the teacher—necessary ingredients of engaged learning.”

However, the teacher is invited to walk a tightrope, as some approaches that contribute to establishing a positive climate and often generate emotions unrelated to academic tasks can disrupt learners’ ability to feel the subtle emotional signals inherent in the construction of skilled intuitions, as the two authors describe:

“[…] the task-irrelevant emotions that activities such as contests and jokes are designed to generate may actually interfere with students’ ability to feel the subtle emotional signals that steer the development and application of new conceptual knowledge. As we saw in the IGT, overanxious, overexcited, or distracted participants may have trouble learning the game. For emotion to be useful, it has to be an integral part of knowing when and how to use the skill being developed. Especially in young learners or in students whose engagement or connection to academic learning is tenuous, the emotional signals that undergird skilled intuition could easily be drowned out. And so, effective teachers are faced with a balancing act. On the one hand, task-irrelevant emotions oftentimes serve an important initial role in establishing a safe and enjoyable social climate in the classroom, they must strike a balance between these two kinds of emotion by actively managing the emotions of their students, helping the learners to attend to, trust, and thrive on the subtle emotional signals they are slowly building as they accumulate meaningful academic experiences. As learners become more emotionally skilled, task-irrelevant emotional activities can fade, leaving actively engaging emotional learning experiences in their place.”

From Emotion Inducer to Neural Conductor

We are social beings, and the acquisition of academic knowledge involves integrating emotion and cognition in a social context, as highlighted by the duo Immordino-Yang and Faeth. We can no longer consider teaching strategies based solely on the individual dimension of the learner. We must also approach the learner as a social being who learns through interaction with others, even when “alone” in front of their computer. Olivier Houdé mentions the research of Suzanne Dikker and colleagues (2017), in which the researchers followed high school students in their biology class throughout a semester. In addition to having their brain activity recorded, the students evaluated their teacher’s pedagogy and their concentration level during the course and gave their appreciation of their classmates and group work.

“In addition to individual balance (homeostasis, own emotion, and motivation), [this] recent scientific research shows how much the synchronous and motivated collective engagement of students’ brains is also important to classroom balance (Dikker, 2017). […] The results revealed that the more students appreciated the course and the pedagogy of their teacher, the more their brain activities were synchronous, that is, mobilizing the same waves at the same times,” explains Houdé, for whom “a good teacher, winning the students’ support, is a true neural conductor!”

This study confirms an old hypothesis about group work, showing that neuroscience does not always contradict the intuitions that have built pedagogy over time and that they can instead validate them.

“Moreover, two other factors [in this study] were associated with better brain synchronization: being friends or close to a student (provided they interacted with them during or just before the class) and valuing group activities. This study is the very first to measure the EEG of a group of students in real conditions and to demonstrate a synchronization of their brains in the pedagogical reality of the class for cognitive resonance (a biology course). Contemporary social neurosciences confirm the intuition of Socrates and Freinet (and Montaigne) regarding the pedagogical virtues of group work,” explains the former professor, now a specialist in cognitive development and learning.

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In light of all these fascinating findings on the role and importance of emotions and the social dimension in learning, one can only be motivated to take a new look at this process and the role of learners, and even more so of the teacher. While the learner benefits from putting themselves in a mindset that allows them to be attuned to their subtle emotional signals as they juggle knowledge, the teacher, in addition to imparting academic knowledge, must ensure they assume their roles as emotion inducers and neural conductors. Fortunately, experts in neuroscience and pedagogy like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Matthias Faeth, and Olivier Houdé offer several concrete strategies to practice so that all this learning resonates with learners and makes sense. All that remains is to explore and disseminate them.

Sources:

  • Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen; Singh, Vanessa, “The Role of Emotion and Skilled Intuition in Learning”, dans Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience, New York, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., p. 93-105, 2016.
  • Houdé, Olivier, « L’école du cerveau : De Montessori, Freinet et Piaget aux sciences cognitives », Collection Le livre de poche. Document, LE LIVRE DE POCHE, 184 pages, 2021.

Note: Quotations have been freely translated
Cognitive, affective and social neuroscience

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field that deals with the study of the nervous system, from neurons to behaviour and draws on a wide range of disciplines, from biology and chemistry to mathematics and computer science. This field is itself divided into several branches or sub-disciplines, including cognitive, affective and social neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience combines neuroscience with the cognitive sciences, including psychology and psychiatry, to gain a better understanding of the functions and dysfunctions of the neural systems involved in behaviour and cognition. They use neuropsychological tests, cognitive tasks and psychophysics, as well as the most sophisticated brain imaging techniques, to unravel the mysteries of higher mental functions (perception, memory, language, etc.). Affective neuroscience is concerned with the behaviour of neurons in relation to emotions, while social neuroscience aims to understand social processes and behaviours through biological mechanisms.