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About LIFE

The LIFE Center, a National Science Foundation-supported Science of Learning Center, represents a collaboration between the University of Washington in Seattle, Stanford University, and SRI International, Inc., both in the San Francisco area. The LIFE Center is a multi-institution Science of Learning Center funded by the National Science Foundation. The University of Washington is the lead institution. Other institutions across the country also participate. LIFE Center researchers represent a broad range of fields, including neurobiology, psychology, education, speech and hearing sciences, anthropology, and sociology, and many of the issues LIFE investigates arise from their interactions.

Humans’ social worlds are rich and complex, and social interaction is essential to our survival as a species. We are exquisitely sensitive to others’ faces, voices, and behaviors, and social cognitive neuroscience is identifying brain systems dedicated to processing social stimuli. At the same time, the impact of culture and social activities on learning in and out of school, especially in informal settings, is gaining increased attention.

In spite of the heightened recognition of the importance of social factors for learning, the relevant mechanisms are not well understood. The LIFE Center is a multi-institution group of scientists whose purpose is to develop and test principles regarding the social foundations of learning. LIFE Center investigators focus on complex human learning over the lifespan with the goal of understanding how and why human social processes affect learning. LIFE Center findings will inform learning theories, influence educational practices, and in affect technologies designed to enhance learning.

Purpose

LIFE’S Purpose is: To develop and test principles about the social foundations of human learning in informal and formal environments with the goal of enhancing human learning from infancy to adulthood.

Mission

The LIFE Center has defined two missions that reflect an interest in the social foundations of learning:

• To identify and investigate underlying principles of how people learn socially by strategically sampling learning across settings, domains, and ages, and by using multiple methodologies (neurobiological, cognitive, developmental, & socio-cultural) to create an integrative syntheses.

• To foster research and education collaborations with individual and institutional partners, and to promote qualitative improvements, both theoretical and practical, in our collective capacities for understanding and supporting human learning.

Our selection of ‘the social foundations of learning’ as LIFE’s Purpose derived from four factors: (a) Center-wide LIFE discussions of our findings with the goal of identifying common principles across diverse settings, domains, and ages, (b) identification of learning features in both informal and formal settings, (c) new advances in related fields, (d) a consensus among LIFE’s scientists that the role of ’social’ in learning is underrepresented in current thinking about the science of learning.

Figure: The LIFE Center Lifelong and Lifewide Learning Diagram - Citation Details
The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram by LIFE Center is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The scope of LIFE’s Missions is illustrated below in Figure 2. LIFE is systematically working in a number of different environments, and across different ages, in order to provide sufficient variability for problem finding, hypothesis testing, and theory building to address our purpose of investigating the social foundations of learning in informal and formal settings.

In Figure 2 below, each number (1-8) represents one or more LIFE research projects involving settings and ages: (1) learning in infancy; (2) early school-age including formal and informal environments; (3) formal K-12 environments; (4) informal environments for middle school students (e.g., clubs, museums and family homes, and connections across these environments and to schools); (5) community college and college environments; (6) graduate training of pre-service teachers; (7) interdisciplinary training of LIFE graduate students and post-docs; and (8) workplace environments. LIFE researchers are making use of the variability found across these settings to uncover key issues of learning that can easily remain invisible if they are not systematically explored under such variation. LIFE’s sampling of settings, domains, and ages is enhanced by collaborations with a variety of individual and institutional partners, in keeping with the goal expressed by Mission 2. We have a number of successful illustrations of that strategy.

Figure 2: The LIFE Center Lifelong and Lifewide Learning Diagram: Illustrated Samples. Numbers represent strategic LIFE sampling across settings, domains and ages to uncover principles of social foundations, social practices, and social designs in learning. - Citation Details
The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram by LIFE Center is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

LIFE’s 4 Theory “Gates”

The LIFE Center’s Purpose and Missions aim to involve theoretical accounts that explain why social learning works in the way that it does. LIFE has developed a Social Gating theoretical framework that examines possible mechanisms by which social interactions fundamentally organize both the processes and outcomes of learning.

LIFE examines which aspects/dimensions/characteristics of social contexts “gate” learning. The word “gate” in our conception refers to mechanisms by which the social system provides affordances, constraints, and cues that influence the choices individuals make in a given situation and the actions they take. The word “gate” might connote something static, but that is not how LIFE uses the term. We conceive of it more as a “gateway” or a “dynamic gate” in which people can and do make choices about the cues, affordances, and constraints to which they will attend. On our view, learners not only experience these social gates, but also make them: Learners organize environments for one another and coordinate their activities to shape the action of the “gates.”

1.    The Attention/Reward Gate captures the idea that social contexts and interactions often increase arousal, and increased arousal can lead to increased attention, motivation, engagement, and encoding of content.

2.    The Intersubjective Coordination Gate captures the idea that social learning is potent because of the close coordination between people. People adjust to each other’s needs and coordinate actions to enhance learning. There are multiple forms of alignment that occur when people interact socially–including speech, posture, gestures, actions, and shared perspectives, feelings, and beliefs. Humans also design social arrangements to create shared resources for making sense of the world; these resources frame the need or intent to learn in ways that non-social arrangements do not. Intersubjective coordination at various levels of analysis (from gestural to linguistic) contributes to communication and the construction of shared meanings. Joint visual attention–cued by gesture, bodily orientation, and speech–helps participants (both infants and adults) signal goals, intentions, desires, and emotions, and also helps parse speech, which contributes to language acquisition.

3.    The Sense of Relationship Gate highlights the idea that a person’s perception of self-in-relation to others affects how they approach a situation, the choices they make, and what they learn from taking part in activity. Learners’ identities influence their belief systems, values, and goals, as well as their choices, and these in turn affect learning (which feeds back to influence identity). Learners’ identities and self-image as actors change with age, experience, and context. A learner’s felt identity and sense of belonging affects his or her engagement and sense of agency in particular settings. Moreover, social others influence–both positively and negatively–the construction of learner identities, and contribute to the maintenance of those identities.

4.    The Evolution/”Socially Adapted Brain” Gate describes the ways that human beings - who developed evolutionarily to learn from and adapt to others in their social group - are predisposed to place special value on human features (faces, voices), patterns of action (biological movement), and interactions (reciprocal exchanges and interactivity). The emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience is beginning to uncover the brain systems that underlie these preferences and more importantly the human brain systems linking social perception and action. These brain systems, sometimes called shared representations or “mirroring systems” link what we see and hear others do and our own actions. They underpin the parity between self and other that supports seamless interpersonal communication and reciprocity. This gate also brings into play emotions that can enhance or hinder learning.

LIFE’s 6 “Social  Learning Drivers”

At its inception, LIFE Center research incorporated three academic traditions. LIFE’s socio-cultural research tradition relied on ethnographic, interview, and survey methods to document the impact of culture and social activities on learning in and out of school. LIFE’s experimental and neural studies used behavioral and neuroscience methods to document the mechanisms underlying social learning from developmental (infancy to adulthood) and neural perspectives, showing the deep reach of culture on the developing individual’s mind and brain. LIFE’s work on formal learning and technology designed new types of social learning technologies that can add-value for both school learning and its assessment.

LIFE’s Center-mode work integrated these traditions into a set of six Social Learning Drivers (SLDs) that need to be taken into account in any transformative theory of the social foundations of human learning. At the same time, each SLD seeks to develop phenomena-specific hypotheses and theories that are less general than the Theory Gates, but nevertheless transformative in their importance and integration of LIFE’s multiple disciplines. Collectively, these six Drivers can be viewed as an integrative network of learning phenomena that need to be explored separately and as an integrated whole in order to better understand social learning. The six are:

LIFE Social Learning Driver 1: IMITATION & JOINT ATTENTION

LIFE Social Learning Driver 6: SIMPLY BELIEVING IN SOCIAL