Similar or Different? The Role of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Similarity Detection

Patients with frontal lobe syndrome can exhibit two types of abnormal behaviour when asked to place a banana and an orange in a single category: some patients categorize them at a concrete level (e.g., “both have peel”), while others continue to look for differences between these objects (e.g., “one is yellow, the other is orange”). These observations raise the question of whether abstraction and similarity detection are distinct processes involved in abstract categorization, and that depend on separate areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We designed an original experimental paradigm for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study involving healthy subjects, confirming the existence of two distinct processes relying on different prefrontal areas, and thus explaining the behavioural dissociation in frontal lesion patients. We showed that: 1) Similarity detection involves the anterior ventrolateral PFC bilaterally with a right-left asymmetry: the right anterior ventrolateral PFC is only engaged in detecting physical similarities; 2) Abstraction per se activates the left dorsolateral PFC

Research On and Activities For Mathematically Gifted Students

This Topical Survey offers a brief overview of the current state of research on and activities for mathematically gifted students around the world. This is of interest to a broad readership, including educational researchers, research mathematicians, mathematics teachers, teacher educators, curriculum designers, doctoral students, and other stakeholders. It first discusses research concerning the nature of mathematical giftedness, including theoretical frameworks and methodologies that are helpful in identifying and/or creating mathematically gifted students, which is described in this section. It also focuses on research on and the development of mathematical talent and innovation in students, including connections between cognitive, social and affective aspects of mathematically gifted students. Exemplary teaching and learning practices, curricula and a variety of programs that contribute to the development of mathematical talent, gifts, and passion are described as well as the pedagogy and mathematics content suitable for educating pre-service and in-service teachers of mathematically gifted students. The final section provides a brief summary of the paper along with suggestions for the research, activities, and resources that should be available to support mathematically gifted students and their teachers, parents, and other stakeholders

Imaging imagination: Brain scanning of the imagined future

In this chapter we review an emerging literature concerning the neuroimaging of various subcomponents of imagination. The preliminary conclusions of this review are two-fold. First, acts of imagination recruit similar networks in the brain to those used for the sensory and motor processing during corresponding actions in, or interactions with the real world (with the important exception that imagined movements do not activate the primary motor cortex). That the majority of studies reviewed have been concerned with visual imagery was inevitable since this is the form of imagination for which most neuroimaging experiments have been conducted. It should be noted that this first conclusion is relevant to all forms of imagination, and not just those of veridical imagery, where there is a 'real world' referent for the imaginary content. Second, the selection processes used in subcomponents of imagination such as anticipation, mindedness, and counterfactual thinking rely on widely distributed subcortical and cortical networks within the brain, consisting of important components such as the cingulate cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum, and the orbitofrontal cortex. These neural structures play quite different functional roles in the complex interactions of real and imagined acts that constitute human thought and behaviour. Further knowledge of the precise functional roles of the interacting networks can be expected from neuroimaging in the coming years, perhaps through the technical breakthroughs which we imagine in a Coda and which could potentially facilitate and enhance our understanding of imagination in the future. © The British Academy 2007

Identifying Gifted Learning in the Regular Classroom : Seeking Intuitive Theories

Identifying instances of gifted thinking in the regular classroom is a continuing challenge for many educators. This chapter links a contemporary model of gifted knowing and learning with identification procedures that are readily implemented in the regular classroom. One way in which students’ learning capacity is displayed in the classroom is through the interpretations or understandings they generate of the teaching. Thinking characteristics of gifted learners include the spontaneous use of high-level fluid analogistic, inferential, analytic, synthetic, and metacognitive strategies. These lead to interpretations that have the characteristics of ‘intuitive theories’. These interpretations differ in their quality from those formed by students who are not gifted. This chapter describes two types of tasks that teachers can use as part of their regular teaching to provide gifted students with the opportunity to display their qualitatively different understanding, concept mapping, and scenario problem-solving. For each task context, summaries will be provided of recent original research studies that show that the task distinguishes between gifted and regular learning students and the characteristics of students gifted in multiple domains. How understanding classification frameworks, such as those provided by Fischer’s (2008)) Dynamic Skill Theory, can be used to analyse and evaluate the understanding generated by students who are gifted in various domains will be explored. The methodology will be included for administering each type of task, the procedures used to interpret outcomes, and the implications for formative assessment and the differentiation of pedagogy and curriculu