Neuroeducation

It’s something of an academic fashion at the moment to prefix ‘neuro’ onto other disciplines- neuromarketing, neuromedia studies, neuroeconomics etc. I’m rather dubious about some of these, however one of them does make sense- Neuroeducation. Key topics in neuroscience include learning and memory, language processing, motivation etc., all topics that are relevant to pedagogy. Indeed, a few years ago I took a postgraduate course on Learning and Teaching and was struck by how education as an academic topic was dominated by opinions and hot air, rarely by evidence. So the idea that education specialists are now looking to a true empirical science for guidance is very welcome.

We are doing our part to at the Quito Brain and Behavior Lab to develop this new field and have started our own neuroeducation research program. This is partly in collaboration with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) Masters in Education degree, which focuses on neuroscience and psychology in relation to education. Most of the students on that program are doing their thesis work on neuroeducation topics in the lab. Some of this is on the effects of exercise on symptoms of ADHD in children but also some other projects on socioeconomic effects on the neuropsychological abilities of adolescents.

However our first neuroeducation project started a couple of years ago. The research attempted to find neuropsychological predictors of academic success of undergraduate students. The motivation was the generally very weak relationship between measures of IQ and student performance. Correlations with Grade Point Average (GPA) data tend to be rather meager, with an average of only about r=.2. We hypothesized that tests of ‘frontal lobe’ function, developed in clinical neuropsychology to measure the disruption of behavior following frontal lesions might be better predictors of real life behavior than traditional intelligence tests.

However, there is a problem with that because most tests of frontal lobe function are highly correlated with intelligence tests, and in fact current thinking suggests that a good part of the neurological basis of intelligence is the prefrontal cortex. Nevertheless, not all ‘frontal lobe’ tests are linked to intelligence. Roca et al. in a study of patients with frontal lobe lesions showed that although general intelligence was affected in the patients compared to healthy controls, there were five different ‘frontal lobe’ tests that were impaired independently of the reduced general intelligence (1):

1. The Proverb Test (abstraction)
2. The Faux Pas Test (theory of mind)
3. Hotel Task (multi-tasking)
4. Hayling Test (verbal response suppression)
5. Stop-signal Task (psychomotor inhibition)

We used those five tests, because if they are measuring high level cognition independently of general intelligence, they are ideal candidates to provide an alternative explanation to IQ for why some students excel at university and others don’t. Interestingly the five tests, shown below, seem to measure five quite different general abilities.

The five frontal lobe tests thought to be not linked to general intelligence (1) 

 We administered the five tests plus a standard measure of intelligence, the WAIS-IV, to 64 USFQ students and then looked at which tests best predicated GPA scores. We found that IQ, as expected, was not a great predictor, in fact it predicted only about 12% of the variance in GPA. However, two of the tests that we administered, the Stop-signal Task and the Hayling Test increased the predicative power to about 24%. The important thing is that these two tests are independently associated with GPA, they are explaining some of the variance in GPA not explained by IQ scores. Interestingly, both of these tests are of response inhibition. It seems that as well as being smart, you need to have good behavioral control to get the good grades.

A further interesting observation is that these two tests are both linked to the right lateral prefrontal cortex (2, 3). In contrast, recent neuropsychological studies have suggested that general intelligence is mainly located in the left hemisphere (4). So do we have two parallel and independent contributions to academic success, one intelligence-based in the left hemisphere, and one about behavior control in the right? That’s what our results suggest. Below we can see this idea graphically, where I’ve marked the left-hemisphere areas linked to general intelligence, and the right hemisphere areas linked to response inhibition.

Lateralised regions for response inhibition in the left hemisphere (2,3) and general intelligence in the right hemisphere (4)

That research was published just last week in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education (5). We are now further developing the idea with a study in the workplace, using the same tests. We are interested in whether response inhibition will again emerge as a predictor of workplace success. Or will perhaps one of the other ‘frontal lobe’ tests, such as the Hotel Task, a test of multi-tasking, be better predictors?

1. Roca, M., et al.. (2009). Executive function and fluid intelligence after frontal lobe lesions. Brain, 133(1), 234-247.
2. Aron, A. R., et al.. (2003). Stop-signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans. Nature Neuroscience, 6(2), 115-116.
3. Robinson, G. A, et al.. (2015). Verbal suppression and strategy use: a role for the right lateral prefrontal cortex?. Brain, 138(4), 1084-1096.
4. Barbey, A. K., et al.. (2012). An integrative architecture for general intelligence and executive function revealed by lesion mapping. Brain, 135(4), 1154-1164.
5. Pluck, G. et al.. (2016). Separate contributions of general intelligence and right prefrontal neurocognitive functions to academic achievement at university level. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 5, 178–185.