 Hello, my name is Tracy Tokohama Espinosa. I'm speaking to you from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, here in Ecuador. It's a pleasure to be with you here in week three to talk about building the mind. As a point of methodology, we're going to be going through a presentation in a video format, but I want you to feel very free to interrupt at any moment. We know the way the mind works is that, you know, waiting to ask questions at the end really isn't the most appropriate way to actually learn a lot of things. So at any moment that you'd like to cut into the video, please tell the facilitator in the classroom and be happy to let my other me, who's, you know, live, talk to you. So, methodologically speaking, we're going to be looking at a bunch of concepts. This week's focus has to do three main topics, cognitive development and intelligence, then social cognition, other factors aside from general intelligence that actually influence our success to learn, and then we're going to look at early interventions or things that we can actually do in informal and formal school settings that can impact the way an individual maximizes their potential. Also going back to the methodology of this particular lesson, I'm going to be integrating a bunch of videos along the way. We're not going to look at everything. I just feel that there's a lot of good information out there and people who express themselves far better than I can about certain topics. So we're going to be integrating those. As you'll see in the slides, we're not going to get to all of the videos and I'd like to encourage you to do this on your own at home, okay? So in this first topic, what we're going to try to be looking at is linking what Dr. Hudson in last week related to the development of the brain itself, the physical structure of the brain, and actually trying to get a sense of how that brain development influences what the mind is able to do at different stages of neurological development. And we're going to also consider how what the mind is perceiving in its own environment actually changes or can shape the brain itself. To do this, in each of these topics, we're going to do some subtopics. So in the very first topic related to cognitive development and intelligence, we're going to first consider kind of a historical perspective or evolutionary perspective of anthropological neuroscience, kind of in brief. And then we're going to be looking at two key theorists, Piaget and Weigatsky. And then we're going to look at the general global idea of intelligence. Another point about methodology in this lesson is that we know you educators out there know this already. It's always better to do a few things in depth than to do this huge, you know, scanning of a panorama and doing a lot of things lightly. However, given the format that we have here, hopefully you're going to be able to use the supplementary videos and the supplementary readings to actually fortify this depth aspect. And unfortunately, for the time sake, we're actually limiting and only going to be looking at contributions of Piaget and Weigatsky because they have been pivotal, whether they knew it or not, in actually giving birth to this field of mind, brain health and education. So we're going to choose a few people. So sorry if we're not doing your favorite theorists about cognitive development, but the idea is basically to integrate or to look at the processes that they went through or the types of things that they looked at as far as cognitive development. And then to actually expand on that, and I'd like to ask you later to actually come back and say, well, what about so-and-so's theory or somebody else's way of approaching this? Because there's a whole lot of wonderful information out there. We've just not got the time to actually go into a bunch of it in as much depth as we'd like to. Okay, after that, we'll look at topic two and three, but first we're going to start with cognitive development and intelligence. In this view, we're going to take some, I'd like you to think about these things as we go through these first few slides. Basically, main question in this first topic is how and why and when does the mind develop? Does the brain build the mind or does the mind build the brain? I'm sure that you've already been thinking about that for the past couple of weeks. How are mental scheme or mental constructs develop? How do we understand red or how do we understand that math might be a different way of thinking than thinking about literature? So just how do we think about things or how do we build these global constructs in our mind? And then finally, what evidence do we have that mental schema are physically evident in the brain? And I'm sure you spoke a lot about that last week. I hope you actually dig more deeply into this in your sections this week as well. But basically, bottom line idea is that we know there's physiological changes in the brain even before there are manifestations in behavior. So can we actually document when somebody or when a little kid finally, you know, light bulb goes off and he connects?