Tenth International School on Mind, Brain and Education
2015 September 8-12
Teaching
Brain
Directors of the School: Antonio M. Battro and Kurt W. Fischer
Directors of the Course: Sidney Strauss and Elena Pasquinelli
Program officer: María Lourdes Majdalani
Hitachi. Japan
Technical challenge to imitate teacher’s mind inferring learner’s mind: Toward development of MindScope
Teaching is defined as a process or action to facilitate learning and impart knowledge or skill to someone. However, the essence of teaching is beyond the information conveyance. Compared to digital devices such as computers and robots which can provide abundant information in quick-ways, direct teaching allows advantageous two-ways dialog between teachers and their pupils. Taking the learner’s mood and condition as consideration is believed promoting the learning progress. For example, teachers are able to sense the class ambience; some students might be lost their interests and concentrations or might be hardly grasp the lecture. Regarding face-to-face communication, teachers will try to attract back student’s attention by calling their names, to closely explain the unintelligible matter and to improve their teaching method for student comprehensiveness. Researchers have been persistently attempting to figure out how people enable to understand others’ mental states (theory of mind), the mechanism has not fully perceived yet. Here, I will introduce a challenge to develop a mindreading technology, MindScope, which will visualize a few components of mind based on brain activation signals. Discussion about the potential of using MindScope in teaching technologies such as computers and robots would be fruitful to approach the essence of teaching.