Mirror Neurons Help Reduce Cognitive Load
August 10th, 2009
Educational Psychology Review devoted a recent issue to cognitive load theory. I recently blogged about an article relating the theory to collaborative learning. A second article looks at how our neurons may be helping us reduce cognitive load.
Van Gog, Paas, Marcus, Ayres & Sweller remind us about mirror neurons. These are the neurons that fire whether we are actually performing an action or watching someone else perform it. They are what allow us to learn by observing.
The authors first apply the idea of these neurons to learning motor tasks from video or animation. There has been some evidence that these dynamic representations require a high cognitive load; a lot of your mental resources are required to process the current information, remember the past information, and relate the two. It may be that the automaticity of these mirror neurons working and “recording” the observation may help free up cognitive space (reducing cognitive load) for things like elaboration. If this is the case, there are a few things we might learn about the use of dynamic representations in instruction: 1) they may be most effective for tasks that involve human movement (as opposed to mechanical objects) because that is what mirror neurons seem most likely to record and 2) should be used over static representations when human movement is to be learned.
A second section of the paper begins with the question of whether these mirror neurons would also record cognitive skills. These skills often aren’t readily observable, except perhaps by think aloud or worked examples. It will be interesting to see if further research can help us understand whether these neurons function in this environment.
There is a hunger in the education world for anything that looks like “brain-based” education. In many cases the insights that these analyses have to offer do not live up to the expectations of educational practitioners. We are still in the infancy of learning about the brain in some ways, and then applying it to a real world setting with all its complexities is difficult. However, this article does provide a small step in the right direction.
Gog, T., Paas, F., Marcus, N., Ayres, P., & Sweller, J. (2008). The Mirror Neuron System and Observational Learning: Implications for the Effectiveness of Dynamic Visualizations Educational Psychology Review, 21 (1), 21-30 DOI: 10.1007/s10648-008-9094-3
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