Brain anatomy tutor

Software	OO language with good GUI tools, such as C#, or for a web interface PHP or JSP plus HTML and CSS.
Covers	Interface development, possibly database systems, cognitive neuroscience, psychology of learning.
Skills Required	Programming, databases, interest in cognitive science.
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ????

Brief Description

Looking what is happening where in the brain when people do a wide variety of thinking tasks while inside MRI scanners is an increasingly important part of psychology, and is having an increasing influence on other research areas (there are fields called 'neuroeconomics' and 'neurophilosophy'). And looking at exactly what people can and can't do when they have damage to particular parts of their brains has long been an important part of cognitive psychology. But how do students and researchers in these areas develop the skills to interpret what they see on their scanners and read about in research reports?

The challenge of this project is to produce a system to train students' visual memories for

Which bits of brain are which and what they are called
What shape the bits of brain are and how they are connected
Which bits of brain are associated with which kinds of mental processing
Which bits of brain show up as very active in MRI scans, when people are doing which sorts of tasks.

As well as neuroanatomy, this project offers plenty of scope for looking into how people learn effectively, and how to design learning activities that will facilitate effective remembering.

Variants

One approach is to start with the major chunks of brain, and work down to more specific detail. But this isn't the only way to do this: teaching the sequences of brain structures that handle visual perception, and what they seem to do, would be plenty.

There are a wide range of situations where people who aren't blessed with good visual memories could benefit from systematic training in what parts of some system are where and how they are connected. Applications include other bits of human anatomy, or the geography of river systems.

The same sort of approaches to teaching structures visually, and getting people to remember spatial arrangements and labels, and maybe spatial movements, could be applied to more abstract systems of parts and relationships, for instance in economics.

Extensions

The project could include ways to ask students questions to test their understanding. Ideally these could be used to give the students self-assessment quizzes.

Ideally, the system should be designed so as to achieve a clear separation between the architecture of the system and the content it delivers, so that additional content can be plugged in without modifying the program, possibly to teach an entirely different topic.

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