Mariano Sigman, Marcela Peña, Andrea P Goldin & Sidarta Ribeiro:

As neuroscience gains social traction and entices media attention, the notion that education has much to benefit from brain research becomes increasingly popular. However, it has been argued that the fundamental bridge toward education is cognitive psychology, not neuroscience. We discuss four specific cases in which neuroscience synergizes with other disciplines to serve education, ranging from very general physiological aspects of human learning such as nutrition, exercise and sleep, to brain architectures that shape the way we acquire language and reading, and neuroscience tools that increasingly allow the early detection of cognitive deficits, especially in preverbal infants. Neuroscience methods, tools and theoretical frameworks have broadened our understanding of the mind in a way that is highly relevant to educational practice. Although the bridge’s cement is still fresh, we argue why it is prime time to march over it.

nn.3672.pdf

Megan R. Gunnar, Camelia E. Hostinar, Mar M. Sanchez, Nim Tottenham & Regina M. Sullivan (2015): Parental buffering of fear and stress neurobiology: Reviewing parallels across rodent, monkey, and human models, Social Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2015.1070198

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2015.1070198

It has been long recognized that parents exert profound influences on child development. Dating back to at least the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the ability for parents to shape child behavior in an enduring way has been noted. Twentieth-century scholars developed theories to explain how parenting histories influence psychological development, and since that time, the number of scientific publications on parenting influences in both human and nonhuman animal fields has grown at an exponential rate, reaching numbers in the thousands by 2015. This special issue describes a symposium delivered by Megan Gunnar, Regina Sullivan, Mar Sanchez, and Nim Tottenham in the Fall of 2014 at the Society for Social Neuroscience. The goal of the symposium was to describe the emerging knowledge on neurobiological mechanisms that mediate parent–offspring interactions across three different species: rodent, monkey, and human. The talks were aimed at designing testable models of parenting effects on the development of emotional and stress regulation. Specifically, the symposium aimed at characterizing the special modulatory (buffering) effects of parental cues on fear- and stress-relevant neurobiology and behaviors of the offspring and to discuss examples of impaired buffering when the parent–infant relationship is disrupted.

Keywords: Parents; Social buffering; Fear; Stress; Amygdala; Prefrontal cortex.

gunnar2015 (5).pdf

Steven A. Hoffman, David Wm. Shucard y Ronald J. Harbeck

Abstract: Evidence is presented that the immune system can affect central nervous system functioning, leading to changes in learning. Immune complex disease is induced in rats and their behavior tested using a Lashley maze. Significant differences in behavior were found between the animals with high disease activity and those with low disease activity and the non-disease controls. These changes were not due to uremia and are most likely due to the immune response. There is some evidence immune complex deposits in the choroid plexus may play some role, but not the sole or major role in the behavioral changes. This provides a model by which immunologic processes can cause neuropsychiatric manifestations in autoimmune diseases like lupus, as well as showing that immune processes can affect behavioral functioning. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Neuro-immune interactions; Immune complex disease; Systemic lupus erythematosus; Behavior; Memory and learning

hoffman1998.pdf