Neuroscience and technology enhanced learning

Abstract

Understanding how our brain responds to other humans can also shed light on our response to artificial agents (tutors, competitors, collaborators). New learning technologies that simulate individual human-like tutoring can benefit from what we understand about human processes of imitation, shared attention and empathy 1. Although we have already seen that visual appearance is not a prerequisite (see Box 3) for activating some of these processes, it does seem that it can play an important role. When we communicate with non-human technology we may recruit brain regions usually involved with communicating face-to-face with each other, but more so if this technology appears moderately humanlike.