The premise for the new thinking: We humans are born immature and naturally curious, and become creatures capable of highly complex cultural achievements — such as the ability to build schools and school systems that can teach us how to create computers that mimic our brains.
With a stronger understanding of how this learning happens, scientists are coming up with new principles for human learning, new educational theories and designs for learning environments that better match how we learn best, says one of the essay's authors, psychologist Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington's Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center.
And social robots have a potentially growing role in these future learning environments, he says. The mechanisms behind these sophisticated machines apparently complement some of the mechanisms behind human learning.