How we Learn Concepts: A Review of Relevant Advances Since 2010 and Its Inspirations for Teaching

TL;DR

This review summarizes recent advances in understanding how humans learn concepts, emphasizing the roles of concrete and abstract concepts, social learning mechanisms, and implications for teaching strategies since 2010.

Contribution

It provides an integrated overview of psychological and neuroscience findings on concept learning and discusses how these insights inform teaching methods and machine learning applications.

Findings

Concrete concepts processed via typical features

Abstract concepts rely on semantic processing

Interpersonal Neuro Synchronization indicates effective knowledge transfer

Abstract

This article reviews the psychological and neuroscience achievements in concept learning since 2010 from the perspectives of individual learning and social learning, and discusses several issues related to concept learning, including the assistance of machine learning about concept learning. 1 In terms of individual learning, current evidences shown that the brain tends to process concrete concepts through typical features (shared features); And abstract concepts, semantic processing is the most important cognitive way. 2 In terms of social learning, Interpersonal Neuro Synchronization (INS) is considered the main indicator of efficient knowledge transfer (such as teaching activities between teachers and students), but this phenomenon only broadens the channels for concept sources and does not change the basic mode of individual concept learning. Ultimately, this article argues that the way the human brain processes concepts depends on concept's own characteristics, so there are no 'better' strategies in teaching, only more 'suitable' strategies.