I was looking for some resources that highlight information processing theory and came across two that I think you’ll enjoy reading.  The first of these is an article found in Cornell University’s Human Ecology (Booker, 2013).  The url is from Walden’s library and is: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=4283b221-7eb5-4ae8-8b7b-0dfa38a7e1a3%40sessionmgr4009&vid=3&hid=4210.

The cite for the article is: Booker, K. (2013). A Window Into the Brain. Human Ecology, 41(2), 4-7.

Dr. Valerie Reyna, a neuroscientist at Cornell’s Ithaca campus, uses MRI technology to map brain activity when we think and react to various stimuli.  This allows researchers to predict the areas of the brain that will react to certain stimuli and map those reactions.  They are looking at what happens in the brain when a person is experiencing various feelings, such as happiness and depression.  Dr. Reyna compares this use of MRI technology to study the brain to the use of microscopes to study cells.  This article is well written and provides good and interesting.  It provides information into a new use of MRI technology to help us understand what goes on in the brain when we have different feelings and think on different things.  An understanding of how different stimuli affect emotional responses can help us understand how the brain processes information.  We know that people learn and retain the information more when it is tied to emotions.  This insight may allow instructional designers to develop training that affects emotional responses, making the training more effective to learners. 

            The second article deals with the adolescent brain (Bessant, 2008).  The url is again from Walden library’s database and is: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=4bdd40b8-42c5-44cc-a67e-41388273088c%40sessionmgr4006&hid=4210.

The cite for the article is: Bessant, J. (2008). Hard wired for risk: neurological science, ‘the adolescent brain’ and developmental theory. Journal of Youth Studies, 11(3), 347-360.

The article begins by saying that much of what research has said about the way the adolescent brain functions has been wrong.  Youth have been stereotyped as causing problems so they should be given certain responsibilities later in life.  The author, Judith Bessant,  disagrees with this, feeling that youth should be given the opportunity to learn from responsibility so they can make good decisions on their own.  Dr. Bessant brings in MRI technology on pp 351 to say that it may not show everything going on in the brain.  There may be activity that it is unable to register.  This doesn’t refute the first article but says that MRI technology cannot show us everything going on in brain activity.  Even when we observe parts of the brain firing synapses during an activity, the article states that there isn’t “a single one-to-one relationship between brain anatomy and mental experience of a behavior or perception” (pp 352). 

This article is well written and covers how research is conducted and then applied to try to create a mold of how a typical you should react in a given situation.  The article points out that the research is conducted primarily in laboratory settings and does not take into account the differences in how a person is brought up, their background and culture.  These play significantly in how a person reacts in a given situation, thus the areas of the brain involved in a reaction.  They can be very different in a group of people.  There is no one map that fits everyone.  When research is conducted with bias built into it, the researchers can direct the outcome to fit those biases.  This is important to instructional designers because we design the training for adolescents.  We need to be careful not to take a particular piece of research or theory at face value and base our design philosophy on it.  As Dr Artino, my teacher in Learning Theories and Instruction at Walden University, mentioned in a discussion, “Just having a theory of learning doesn't automatically mean we now know how to teach or develop instruction”.  Theories change but instruction needs to be developed to engage the students so they want to learn it and so they remember it.  I recommend this article because of the insight it brings to adolescent learning.