In the last decade, there has been an explosion of research which can be clustered into the rather broad church of "educational neuroscience." With respect to children, this research has been focused largely on disorders of development, in particular developmental dyslexia and autism. Nevertheless, important neural insights about structure-function relations have galvanised basic behavioural work in cognitive development, with important implications for education. For example, some cognitive neuroscience explorations of autism suggest that the mirror neuron system plays a role in social cognitive development (Dapretto et al., 2006). Such studies have led to renewed efforts to understand how infant imitation, social referencing and gaze following contribute to the typical developmental trajectory for social cognition (e.g., Gergely, 2010; Meltzoff, 2010). Related empirical work exploring the importance of the sharing of psychological states and thereby of cultural and familial contexts for social cognition ("collective intentionality," e.g., Carpenter, 2010) link directly to socio-cultural perspectives in education. These socio-cultural perspectives foreground the insights of Vygotsky into the importance of cultural contexts in learning (Vygotsky, 1978).
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