Cognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations

This book aims to present theoretical and practical innovations in the cognitive sciences and education fields focusing on studies and research conducted with non-WEIRD (i.e., western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, especially from Latin America. Cognitive sciences and neuroscience have increased exponentially their knowledge in the last three decades, and today there is a corpus of knowledge about our central nervous system and its functioning that (adequately understood) has promising contributions for the educational field. Most of this knowledge, however, comes from central countries (North America, Europe) and is based on studies conducted on what has been called WEIRD populations. Much less is known about how the integration of cognitive sciences and neuroscience could impact education in non-WEIRD populations, which represent the great majority of the world’s population and have quite diverse cultural and social characteristics. So, the main aim of this book is to present a non-WEIRD scientific approach to problems in the cognitive sciences, neuroscience and education fields.

Research presented in this contributed volume takes advantage of the diverse populations that characterize developing countries to explore how underrepresented populations learn, what works and what does not for cognitive science and education not only for the developing world, but also for understanding diversity in the whole world. Departing from this focus on diversity, chapters in this book present studies on theories, beliefs and misconceptions about the relationship between cognitive sciences and education; child and adolescent cognitive development; mathematics and language academic performance; and cognitive interventions to improve educational practice.

Cognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations: A Latin American Perspective will be a useful resource for both cognitive scientists and educational researchers interested in developing a more culturally sensitive approach to basic and applied research on cognitive sciences of education.  

Marcus Vinicius Alves  holds a PhD in psychobiology from Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Brazil) and has experience as a visiting researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada) and as a research and development specialist at Université du Luxembourg (Luxembourg). At present, he is a full professor at Faculty of Technology and Sciences in Salvador, Brazil, and also the lead researcher of the Sociocognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory (LINES), registered at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ). Alves’ research interests include learning, memory, incidental and motivated forgetting, mental effort (processing systems, attention, and cognitive load theory), and social cognition, using mostly eye tracking and pupillometry.

Roberta Ekuni is an Adjunct Professor at Universidade Estadual do Norte do Paraná - Graduate Program in Education. She has a PhD at Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Brazil), and she was a visitor student at Washington University in St. Louis. Also, she is one of the editors of “Neuromyth’s Busters” book collection. She has interest in research that applies cognitive psychology to education, especially involving retrieval practice to improve student’s memory.

Maria Julia Hermida is an Adjunct Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham and researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, in Argentina. She has received a PhD in Psychology from the Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina. For more than ten years she has been studying child cognitive development, how it is affected by poverty and which interventions can help to prevent the negative cognitive consequences of poverty. Specifically, she has conducted different interventions combining cognitive neuroscience and educational approaches in diverse scholar contexts.

Juan Valle Lisboa is an Aggregate Professor of Biophysics and Neuroscience at Universidad de la República (UDELAR), sharing his time between the Schools of Science and Psychology. He is a member of the Program for the Development of Basic Science PEDECIBA Council (www.pedeciba.edu.uy). He has received a PhD in Biology and a Master in Biophysics from the PEDECIBA-UDELAR program.  His main research interests are the study of learning and cognition, and the application of digital technologies to enhance Education. In particular in the last few years he has directed projects aimed at measuring math and reading abilities as well as neuropsychological predictors of reading with the use of digital devices like tablets and cell phones. He is also interested in basic aspects of language processing, lexical representation and linguistic composition, and the use of neural network models to describe these processes.