Scientific American article Summary

In the Scientific American article Learning Fear by Watching: The Brainier, Cheaper Path to Knowledge, Kevin Ochsner from Columbia University attempts to underline what regions of the brain are active while learning through second hand experience. In order to do this, Ochsner illustrates how a recent study, Learning Fears by Observing Others: The Neural Systems of Social Fear Transmission, by Andreas Olsson and Elizabeth Phelps, depicts how we learn vicariously and store this information.
The bulk of research regarding how we learn has been done on the effects of first-hand experiences. However, we tend to learn though observing others’ experiences as well, thereby acquiring information vicariously through them. As a part of this study, Olsson and Phelps carried out an experiment whereby participants’ “neural activity” was measured as they watched a clip depicting an example of classical fear conditioning. In the clip, an actor was shown to gradually associate a certain shape with the administration of an electric shock. Hence, the participants witnessed the actor come to fear the shape due to the painful stimulus it elicited. Fear learning can be measured through a technique called “skin conductance,” whereby the change in electrical resistance on the surface of the hand is used as an indicator of whether fear learning has occurred.
When one is learning through direct experience, a region of the brain called the amygdala shows clear activation. According to an imaging study conducted by Olsson and Phelps, “functional brain scans” depicted the same type of activation (in the amygdala region of the brain) when a participant was watching an actor in a video clip learn though direct experience. This demonstrates that the participants were learning to associate the shape with a painful stimulus (hence, a fear of the shape), similar to that they witnessed being experienced by the actor in the video. When the participants’ skin conductance was measured, it indicated that they had learned to couple the shape with a fear of receiving an uncomfortable stimulus. This implies that people posses the tendency to learn through observing others. This can be seen as a result of similarities in brain activity during direct experiences or watching others learn.
Olsson and Phelps, taken in conjunction with a number of previous studies done on this subject matter, suggests that we tend to learn from observing others’ experiences by putting ourselves in their shoes, thereby better understanding them. However, due to the relatively crude nature of the imaging technique, it is not as yet possible to predict behaviors. We may gain a general idea of what a person is thinking by observing their neural activity, however, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to pin-point exactly what those thoughts entail. Activation of corresponding regions of the brain does not denote a concurrence in the feelings of the observer and the person being observed. However, the scope of learning can be determined through activity in brain regions called the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
Nonetheless, it is difficult to equate fear learning with solely observation. There is most often an interplay between direct experiences and observing and analyzing the behaviors of the person being watched.
I have always found the question of how we learn to be intriguing due to which Ocsher’s article, delineating the results of Olsson and Phelps experiment, caught my eye instantly. I hope that more research is carried out in the future to better understand the influence of second -hand learning as I feel this is an integral part of how we acquire knowledge.

* Learning Fear by Watching: The Brainier, Cheaper Path to Knowledge, Kevin Ochsner
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=learning_fear_by_watching_the_brainer_ch&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1