How Our Brains Process Different Types of Learning

Did you know that the brain activates in different patterns when playing games with others, as opposed to when you're playing against yourself? If not, it may interest you to know that this happens because we are building a model of how our opponents and team members think and act, inside our brains.

How this capacity to emulate other's thoughts develops in the brain has been of extreme interest for scientists. A team at the University of Illinois has recently conducted the first study on this issue that used a computational approach to analyzing brain patterns, and the results are captivating.

Learning from consequences (reinforcement learning) and learning from others' actions (belief learning) were found to be coded by the same area of the brain, which is something no one expected.

The fMRI study also showed that belief learning was partially “seated” in an area of the brain responsible for processing errors and regret. Interestingly, the new findings may be used to treat schizophrenia, depression and Parkinson’s disease, PsychCentral reports.