Along with its academic and corporate partners, UCSD will establish a multidisciplinary Center to study the temporal dynamics of learning, the Dynamic Learning Center, involving investigators from fields as diverse as cognitive science, machine learning and robotics, developmental and perceptual psychology, and neuroscience. The administrative location of the Center will be at the University of California, San Diego, with partner institutions, Rutgers University and Vanderbilt University and substantive participation from investigators at UC Berkeley, Brown, CMU, CU Boulder, Pittsburgh, Queensland, the Salk Institute, San Diego State University, Victoria, and Yale.
The intellectual merit of the Center will be its focus upon the role of time and timing in learning, at multiple time scales and in multiple systems. It is clear that these levels of description cannot be understood in isolation, or from only one disciplinary approach. The team proposes to integrate work in machine learning, social robotics, the neurobiology of learning and memory, electrophysiology, brain imaging, behavior, and theoretical neuroscience in order to develop a new, integrated view of the dynamics of learning at multiple time scales. The Center will be unique in its emphasis on research networks composed of interdisciplinary teams of scientists addressing common questions in the study of time and timing in learning. The broader impact of this proposal will be first, to develop novel training activities and cyberinfrastructure in order to make truly collaborative interdisciplinary research possible; second, to work with local schools on novel educational initiatives; and third, to develop new public outreach programs. Unlike typical training programs, the training activities will be aimed at senior scientists as well as students and junior scientists; and they will involve a range of vehicles, including intensive "bootcamps," internships, and summer schools. Center scientists and select classroom teachers will educate each other in order to achieve effective translation of the science to pertinent classroom initiatives. Translation to the classroom will be facilitated by the expertise of the Center's corporate partners in educational technology. The Center will recruit new undergraduate and graduate students, with the particular goal of increasing the breadth and diversity of the student population, through partnerships with Rutgers Newark and UCSD's charter school for low-income students, The Preuss School. The Center will provide internships for high school students; intensive workshops for approximately 80 inner-city high school students in the Reach for Tomorrow program each summer, and a summer workshop for teachers. The Center's research will be disseminated to the public through the medium of The Science Network, a web-based multi-media programming platform that will be a trusted destination for those concerned with science and its impact on society.
The center mode is essential to this enterprise, given the ambitious goal of creating a new science of the temporal dynamics of learning. Answering fundamental questions in this discipline will require technological support for a large group of committed scientists and teachers to incubate ideas, share data, share research tools, and theoretical advances. The Data Sharing Facility that will enable this interaction will become a model technology and software architecture for future collaborative science.
Center (TDLC) was formed in 2006 under Director Garrison W. Cottrell, Ph.D., and funded by National Science Foundation, as one of six Science of Learning Centers in the US. Our purpose is to achieve an integrated understanding of the role of time and timing in learning, across multiple time and spatial scales, brain systems, social systems. We believe that a detailed scientific understanding of how the brain learns is important for transforming education in the US. Timing plays a role in the functioning of brain cells whenever a student comes to class, reads, speaks, learns new facts, interacts with friends and teachers, tinkers with new gadgets, or engages in countless other learning activities. As a simple example, feedback from a teacher that is too late – e.g., "……..good answer!" is different from temporally appropriate feedback "Good answer!" We know that this affects learning via the timing of reward circuits in the brain. To confront such a daunting task, we built a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of 38 faculty members from 18 universities and institutions in the US, Canada, England and Australia. To organize such a large group, we created a "network of research networks" – four research networks of 8-12 faculty members each comprise teams of scientists that can build collaborations over years of interacting. In our initial five years, researchers from multiple disciplines interested in common questions have coalesced around many studies carried out with human, animal or computational models. This has allowed for unprecedented convergence of techniques on single research questions. The collaborations have been fruitful. For instance, we discovered that by measuring the strength of brain waves in infants, we could predict their cognitive and language scores years later, providing a powerful predictor of language difficulties. This paves the way for early intervention. The first picture shows April Benasich of Rutgers placing an electrode cap on a toddler to measure her brainwaves. We also discovered the best spacing between study sessions for retention of the material. So, for example, if you are studying Spanish vocabulary words, we have developed a system that schedules the best time to study those words again, since we can predict when you are about to forget them. Another singular endeavor has been the Gamelan Project. The second picture shows students learning to play gamelan. Balinese gamelan is a musical form requiring a very high degree of synchronization between the players. A teacher associated with our center noticed that children who were poor synchronizers also seemed to have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Based on his prediction, we began a scientific study to see if it were true, and we indeed found that children who were judged to be ADD by their teachers were also poor synchronizers. Now an interesting question is to go in the other direction: Does learning to synchronize can improve their attentional skills? These are just a few of our projects. To learn more about the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, visit tdlc.ucsd.edu.
