Explorer Modules

Quest questions and state statements. I talked about those before. Now I’ll come at it from a different perspective. Does the brain handle these things differently? Of course, I think it does. But the issue can be settled by fMRI. Here is one step in that direction, from a study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in Nature on 15th June.

These researchers distinguish between exploration (taking actions to find out new things) and exploitation (taking actions that exploit what you already know). What they found was that exploration activated brain areas not involved in taking actions on the basis of what people already knew.

Exploration, of course, corresponds to quest questions. Exploitation is somewhat like state statements although I was talking about statements coming in from the experience of other people. So the evidence I want to see is not in yet.

That research will not be easy to get. Dr Daw, of UCL, pointed out: "Most people switch between exploring and exploiting seamlessly and this has always made it hard to distinguish between someone who is doing something they know will offer the highest pay-out and a person who is testing out new options.” These researchers used a specialized method to make that distinction.

But in the absence of data, I will speculate. It is likely that exploration draws on a lot more brain power than does trying to store verbal input in declarative form. The problem in such research is likely to be that you cannot tell what storage methods the subject is using. Skilled learners probably have routines (such as forming their own quest questions) that activate the exploring parts of the brain.

You could ask them about their strategies, but they may not have noticed. Or they may think everyone else is doing the same thing.

An alternative would be to compare effective learners with less effective learners. See what differences you find between the brain activation. That might suggest some ways to improve learning strategies. The UCL researchers identified particular brain modules that were activated in their paradigm. I think these might turn out the be part of the Explorer system. If so, the best learning strategy might be to turn a learning assignment into an exploration. And you could tell how well people were using that strategy if you know what brain areas were being activated.