What is discussed in this article?

Humans are extremely social. Studies have shown that social responses are very rapid and instinctive, and that humans have a great ability to read other people’s gestures and facial expressions in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. Humans are constantly reading other people’s emotional states, which is called ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing’. This ability to mentalize develops over the first four or five years of life. Around the age of 4, children begin to understand that someone else can hold a belief that differs from their own and which can be false. Mentalizing is extremely important for social interactions.

The importance of social interaction for learning can be described with the following example. Japanese people are unable to distinguish between R and L sounds. However, Japanese babies before the age of nine months are able to distinguish between those sounds. However, when they become older they lose this ability, because they are not exposed to the subtle difference between those sounds. A question is whether this can be relearned. There are two implications from research on this topic. First, relearning is possible. It is possible to relearn sounds after the critical period. Second, social interaction seems to be a critical and constraining factor. There is something special about relearning; when there is a real live person compared to videos, relearning is more present. It is not entirely clear why this effect occurs. It could be that social interaction increases infants’ motivation through enhanced attention and arousal. Social interaction can also help to tailor the training content for the learner. Another important finding is that, by nine months, infants realize that pointing to or looking to an object indicates that this object is being referred to.Studies have determined which brain regions are involved in mentalizing, namely the posterior STS at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the temporal poles and the dorsal medial PFC.

In an online mentalizing task, participants view a set of shelves containing objects. They are instructed to move by a ‘Director’, who can see some but not all of the objects. To be able to correctly interpretate the instructions, the participants need to be able to take the director’s perspective, and only move objects that the director can see. This showed that adolescents make more errors than adults, which indicates that the ability to take the perspective of others is still under development in adolescence.

What are implications for education?

Both early childhood and adolescence should be viewed as a sensitive period for learning. The aim of education for adolescents might change to include abilities that are controlled by parts of the brain that undergo most change during adolescence, such as internal control, multitasking, and planning. It might also be helpful to include in the curriculum teaching on the changes that occur in the brain during adolescence. Adolescents might be interested in this, and it might also benefit them to learn how their own brain changes.