RESEARCH SUMMARIES

Business Week, May 26, 2003, McGraw-Hill Co., The New Gender Gap, by Michelle Conlin, pp 75-82. This article, lengthy and full of narratives and comment, contains an interesting look at the plight of male children in academic and leadership status in today’s society. There is allusion to the work of Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Volume 4. May 2003, p. 332. Gambling on dopamine, by Rachel Jones. In research done by C. D. Florillo and others, and reported in SCIENCE, monkeys were conditioned with different stimuli, each with a distinct probability of reward. In one case, reward was predictable, in one reward was not reliably predictable. It was discovered that the stimulus-related signal was the greatest when “…there was the most uncertainty about whether a reward would be forthcoming.” The midbrains of the experimental animals produced a stimulus-related signal that was stronger for the stimuli that predicted reliable rewards, but a reward-related signal was strongest when the reward was not reliably predictable.

The work results are being seen as important in understanding gambling addictions, but may also have an application to teaching and learning. The author points out the Pearce-Hall theory of learning, that attention depends on uncertainty about reinforcers, and that learning depends on attention. Therefore, if a learning environment can present uncertainty about whether an action or event is rewarding, the brain will have too little information to accurately base a prediction upon – so will pay close attention to learn the outcome of the task. “The dopamine neurons could be providing a signal that facilitates attention,
and therefore learning.”