̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - life long learning

Tuning into brainwave rhythms speeds up learning in adults

fpjl2 — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 14:28:09 +0000

̽��ֱ��first study to show that delivering information at the natural tempo of our neural pulses accelerates our ability to learn.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� and Nanyang Technological ̽��ֱ��, Singapore establish new research centre to support lifelong learning

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 14:50:57 +0000

̽��ֱ��Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC) is a collaboration between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Nanyang Technological ̽��ֱ��, Singapore (NTU Singapore), and is funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation.

Cultivating new skills is a lifelong process that requires cognitive flexibility, yet there is currently a gap in evidence-based training programmes that can effectively support and promote this way of learning throughout people’s lives.

Cognitive flexibility goes far beyond conventional IQ; it is the essential capacity for responding to the fluctuating events of the modern world. It underlies adaptive coping to change, and also the generation of innovative, creative thinking.

Trevor Robbins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Psychology in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and a senior academic advisor to the programme, said: "Understanding the psychological basis of cognitive flexibility and its basis in the brain will have enormous societal benefits, with educational, as well as clinical, impact.”

He added: “This novel and original collaborative programme by two leading Universities will enhance the science of learning by innovative interventions and methods, for training cognitive flexibility over the life span."

̽��ֱ��research programme will be led by Zoe Kourtzi, Professor of Experimental Psychology in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. Involving researchers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education, CLIC will explore cross-disciplinary ways to develop innovative research in the science of learning. ̽��ֱ��ultimate goal is to translate these research findings into an integrated model of learning that can be applied in the real world, improving cognitive flexibility across the life span.

Research will focus on four life stages - early years, adolescence, young adults and middle age - when flexible behaviour is critical for coping with changing circumstances. During these periods the brain undergoes neural changes such as early maturation, restructuring or resilience to decline, presenting important opportunities for intervention.

NTU Senior Vice President (Research), Professor Lam Khin Yong said: “ ̽��ֱ��cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers from NTU Singapore and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is expected to have wide-ranging impact on workers, as technology and globalisation change the nature of labour markets worldwide.”

He added: “ ̽��ֱ��ability to develop and master new skills at the workplace is becoming increasingly pressing globally. Singapore’s nationwide SkillsFuture programme, for example, gives opportunities for people to develop their fullest potential throughout life. Yet, we know that differences in individual cognitive functions can affect learning and performance. This is where research in the Science of Learning can play a key role in enhancing educational outcomes and practice. ̽��ֱ��new Centre will support the country’s drive in helping the workforce prepare for the digital economy, as businesses turn to automation.”

Annabel Chen, Co-Director of CLIC and Professor of Psychology and Director for the Centre for Research and Development in Learning (CRADLE) at NTU, Singapore, said: “This is an exciting development for research in the Science of Learning. We have been working closely with colleagues from Cambridge, and tapping into expertise across NTU, including the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Business School, National Institute of Education, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and College of Engineering to develop the CLIC programme.”

She added: “This development complements the Science of Learning Initiative in the Centre of Research and Development in Learning (CRADLE), launched by NTU in 2015. With this multidisciplinary effort and input from the Ministry of Education and SkillsFuture Singapore, we believe our programme will be able to provide insights and translatable solutions for the Future of Learning and Economy in Singapore and beyond.”

̽��ֱ��collaboration was brought together through the presence of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s first overseas research centre in Singapore, the Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore Ltd (CARES). CARES was established in 2013 under the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) – a collection of 15 joint research programmes between local universities and top overseas institutions funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF). ̽��ֱ��Centre hosts several research programmes, most of which involve NTU and focus on the decarbonisation of Singapore’s chemical industry.

̽��ֱ��new programme on the science of learning is a novel direction for CARES and CREATE, bringing together expertise from Cambridge and Singapore to investigate new ways of helping people prepare and adapt to the rapidly changing workplace.

A new research centre focused on improving support for lifelong learning and cognitive agility opened on 1 October 2020 in Singapore.

̽��ֱ��programme will enhance the science of learning by innovative interventions and methods, for training cognitive flexibility over the life span

Trevor Robbins

Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Coloured pencils

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Lifelong learning and the plastic brain

lw355 — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:06:56 +0000

When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

̽��ֱ��illusion, so-named after it was spotted on the wall of a Bristol café in the 1970s, is a much-debated geometrical trick of the eye and brain in which perfectly parallel lines of black and white tiles appear wedge-shaped and sloped.

It’s also an excellent demonstration of how the brain interprets the world in a way that moves beyond what the input is from the eye, as one of the experimental psychologists, Professor Zoe Kourtzi, explained. “In interpreting the world around us, our brains are challenged by a plethora of information. ̽��ֱ��brain is thought to integrate information from multiple sources and solve the puzzle of perception by taking into account not only the signals registered by the sensory organs but also their context in space and time.

“In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation.”

From the day we are born, neurons in the brain start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Neuroscientists refer to the brain’s ‘plasticity’ in explaining this ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions.

To unravel the mechanisms that underlie how brains learn, Kourtzi’s team is looking at how brains recognise objects in a cluttered scene. “This aspect is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments,” she explained. “It’s how we recognise a face in a crowd or a landmark during navigation.”

Visual perception is also highly trainable. ̽��ֱ��brain can use previous experience of similar cues to be quicker at identifying the image from the ‘noise’ – the proverbial needle from the haystack.

But although neuroscientists recognise that this type of brain plasticity is fundamental to our ability to cope with continually changing settings at home, school, work and play, little is known about how we can stimulate our brain to enhance this learning process, right across the life span.

“ ̽��ֱ��process of ‘learning to learn’ is at the core of flexible human behaviours,” explained Kourtzi. “It underpins how children acquire literacy and numeracy, and how adults develop work-related skills later in life.”

One of the important determinants her team has discovered is that being able to multi-task is better than being able to memorise.

“ ̽��ֱ��faster learners are those who can attend to multiple things at the same time and recruit areas of the brain that are involved in attention,” she explained. “Those who are slower at learning try to memorise, as we can see from greater activity in the parts of the brain connected with memory.”

“So, in fact, being able to do the sort of multi-tasking required when interacting in busy environments or playing video games – which requires the processing of multiple streams of information – can improve your ability to learn.”

She also finds that age doesn’t matter: “what seems to matter is your strategy in life – so if older people have really good attentive abilities they can learn as fast as younger people.”

This has important implications for an ageing society. In the UK, there are now more people over State Pension age than there are children. ̽��ֱ��UK’s Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2020, people over 50 will make up almost a third of the workforce and almost half of the adult population. ̽��ֱ��average life expectancy for a man in the UK will have risen from 65 years in 1951 to 91 years by 2050. Older age has become an increasingly active phase of people’s lives, one in which re-training and cognitive resilience is increasingly sought after.

Kourtzi and colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect when areas of the brain are activated in response to a sensory input and how these circuits change with learning and experience. While at the ̽��ֱ�� of Birmingham, she showed that the visual recognition abilities of young and older adults can be enhanced by training, but that the different age groups use different neural circuits to do this.

Young adults use anterior brain centres that are often used in perceptual decisions, where sensory information is evaluated for a decision to be made; older adults, by contrast, use the posterior part of the brain, which is in charge of the ability to attend and select a target from irrelevant clutter. “ ̽��ֱ��clear implication of this is that training programmes need to be geared for age,” said Kourtzi.

Crucially, what she also observed is that some people benefit from training more than others: “although it’s well known that practice makes perfect, some people are better at learning and may benefit more from particular interventions than others. But to determine how and why, we need to go beyond biological factors, like cognition or genetics, to look at social factors: what is it about the way a particular individual has learned to approach learning in their social setting that might affect their ability to learn?”

This multidisciplinary approach to understanding learning lies at the heart of her work. She leads the European-Union-funded Adaptive Brain Computations project, which brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists across eight European universities, plus industrial partners, to understand and test how learning happens.

“In our work, there’s a strong element of translating our findings into practical applications, so creating training programmes that are age appropriate is our ultimate goal,” she added.

“ ̽��ֱ��reason we like the Café Wall Illusion so much is because tricks of visual perception tell us that the brain can see things in a different way to the input. How the brain does this is influenced by context, just as the way we interpret our environment is influenced by learning and previous experience.”

Inset image: Café Wall Illusion, Tony Kerr on Flickr

Our brains are plastic. They continually remould neural connections as we learn, experience and adapt. Now researchers are asking if new understanding of these processes can help us train our brains.

In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation

Zoe Kourtzi

Sam Webster

11 Thinking about it

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New funding for part-time study could boost student numbers

sjr81 — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:56:58 +0000

This year, for the first time, the Government has announced that it will be funding student loans for part-time study towards an award, with no upper age limit for applying.

From September 1, 2012, part-time students studying for higher qualifications than they already hold (and provided they are resident in the UK or EU) will be eligible to apply for a tuition fee loan of up to £6,750, meaning they will not have to pay for any tuition fees up front.

Under the new rules, students will not have to repay their loans until they are earning more than £21,000 a year – meaning that many who are retired or on state pensions, sometimes known as ‘grey students’, may never have to repay their student loans.

ICE’s Dr Rebecca Lingwood said: “We're delighted that the value of part-time study is being recognised, with the introduction of Tuition Fee Loans. Here at ICE, our part-time Certificate and Diploma courses, which are undergraduate-level ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge awards, attract a huge range of people, many of whom are studying at university level for the first time and do not have the time or the resources to embark on a full-time degree. ICE offers them an accessible, intimidation-free route into higher education, and gives access to Cambridge’s world-class expertise and facilities.

“ICE courses are also very good value for money compared with traditional undergraduate degrees. A typical Certificate course equating to half a year’s undergraduate study costs around £1,350.”

And with current research at Cambridge and elsewhere suggesting that education– at whatever age – can help keep the brain healthy, there may never have been a better time for students of all ages to apply.

Dr Lorraine Taylor, from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain, said: “Extensive amounts of research have shown that, whatever our age, maintaining social, intellectual or physical activities has benefits on quality of life, wellbeing, and health which in turn improve cognition.

“Studying later in life has many benefits; it not only increases our skills but also increases confidence, social interaction and general engagement in life. All of these help to maintain cognitive and physical health throughout our lives and into old age.”

Certificate and Diploma applications for the new academic year at the ̽��ֱ��’s Institute of Continuing Education opened to the public in June and close on September 10, 2012.

Among ICE’s new courses for 2012-13 are an Undergraduate Certificate in Astronomy, Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature, an Undergraduate Diploma in Coaching and an Undergraduate Advanced Diploma in Philosophy.

ICE is also expected to launch an Advanced Diploma in Ecological Monitoring and Conservation from February 2013.

Advanced Diplomas are two-year, part-time research-based courses taught at third-year undergraduate level via a series of one-to-one supervisions. So, they are well-suited to those living farther afield but able to travel to Cambridge occasionally and they provide a solid foundation for postgraduate study.

Added Lingwood: “Higher education can be a truly life-changing experience for many adults. We hope that the new loan scheme will make part-time study accessible to more people than ever before.”

For further details about the Institute and its range of courses, visit: https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/

New government funding for part-time study may lead to a surge of older students returning to the classroom, according to the Director of the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

ICE courses are also very good value for money compared with traditional undergraduate degrees. A typical Certificate course equating to half a year’s undergraduate study costs around £1,350

Dr Rebecca Lingwood

Madingley Hall

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