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Research and Organizing Concepts

LIFE research is organized into the following organizing concepts, each of which explores the importance of social interaction in learning, why it is so powerful, and how it works.

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 2: LANGUAGE

LIFE Social Learning Driver 3: IDENTITY

LIFE Social Learning Driver 4: GUIDING & COLLABORATING

LIFE Social Learning Driver 5: CHOOSING & VALUING

LIFE Social Learning Driver 6: SIMPLY BELIEVING IN SOCIAL

To answer the questions posed by the organizing concepts, LIFE researchers conduct innovative research ranging from cognitive development to educational technology design.