Microsoft Word 1-Experimental Analysis on the Development of Cognitive Processes in Childhood through Body Experience

Introduction

 
In recent years, the world of scientific research has opened up to new scenarios of didactic intervention, 
aiming at enhancing cognitive processes from the pre-school period. The approach of Educational 
Neuroscience (EN) shows a clear picture of the links between social and relational skills on the one hand, and 
the cognitive domain on the other, depicting the didactic experience as something that shapes the processes 
underlying cognitive skills (Meares, 2012). This perspective designates the mind as 
embodied and embedded
; 
embodied in a bodily, internal context, and at the same time, constitutively embedded in an external relational 
context (Morabito, 2016). This represents the essence of the Theory of Embodied Cognition (EC), which 
encompasses the concept that the mind is no longer independent of the body, but it is enclosed in it (Peluso 
Cassese & Torregiani, 2017). Therefore, the body takes on both a cognitive and a social function, realizing a 
close relationship with the mechanisms of thought and knowledge made explicit by behavior, communication, 
participation, sharing, and collaboration (Peluso Cassese, Torregiani, & Bonfiglio, 2017). Educational 
Neurosciences represent an attempt to build methodological and theoretical bridges among Cognitive 
Neurosciences, Cognitive Psychology, and Educational Practice, proposing a more scientific understanding of 
Giulia Torregiani,
Ph.D. Student, Neuroscience and Law, Department of Psychology, Niccolò Cusano Rome University, Rome, Italy. 
Luisa Bonfiglio, Professor on Contract, Department of Education, Niccolò Cusano Rome University, Rome, Italy. 
Francesco Maria Melchiori, Researcher Teaching Fellow, Department of Psychology, Niccolò Cusano Rome University, Rome, Italy. 
Francesco Peluso Cassese, Associate Professor, Department of Education, Niccolò Cusano Rome University, Rome, Italy. 
DAVID 
PUBLISHING 
D 

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the processes involved in the educational skills acquisition (Howard-Jones et al., 2016). This interdisciplinary 
field contemplates how neural systems change during learning and development, offering the opportunity to 
reformulate and adapt educational approaches to the children’s specific needs. In fact, neuroscientific cognitive 
research on learning can provide potential benefits to education, especially for students with special educational 
needs, investigating the neural mechanisms underlying atypical skills development (National Science 
Foundation, USA, 2007). On the basis of this scientific evidence, this research work aims at validating a 
didactic approach that can become an orientation of an educational practice with an unstructured matrix, which 
originates from the epistemology in the pedagogical field. Among the reference paradigms it is possible to trace 
pedagogical activism (Dewey, 1899; Vaccani, 1979), taking the view that school, intended as a laboratory, 
should aim at consolidating the potentialities and the intellectual resources in the realization of individuality in 
relation to sociality, in a learning-by-doing perspective. Experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) is seen as a process 
in which knowledge is created through the transformation, interpretation, understanding, and active 
experimentation of an experience. Significant learning (Ausubel, 1968) is considered as a proof that, in order to 
learn, we need to research and rework knowledge to give meaning to the latter, both through the integration of 
new information with those already owned, and through its use in different contexts and situations, so as to 
develop problem solving, critical thinking, and meta-reflection skills. Learning is significant when it allows 
students to become proficient in strategies by learning how to learn, relating to others and knowing how to 
work in a group, or through the development of meta-cognitive, attitudinal, autonomy, and creativity skills. 
Moreover, the enactivism arising from the theories developed by Merleau-Ponty (1969) and Bateson (1977), up 
to those developed by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Rivoltella and Rossi (2017), which see
in the didactic action the construction of affective and relational cognitive networks not producing knowledge, but 
being knowledge itself, so that during the action the system co-evolves together with the trajectories each subject: each 
action changes while the surrounding environment changes, and the action changes the system during the process. As the 
system changes, it learns; it is clear that change and knowledge in action are two sides of the same coin. Knowledge is not 
a content, an information placed somewhere in the brain, but it is a state of the person, the result of that change that 
involves mind and body during the action. This process is the founding core of the enactivist theory. (Rossi, 2011, p. 44)
The Activity Based Intervention (ABI) was conceived by Pretty-Frontczak and Bricker (2004); it addresses 
children’s educational and development goals by encouraging them to participate in meaningful activities, 
experimenting with various learning opportunities, highlighting the importance of timely feedback, and 
emphasizing the development and generalization of functional skills in highlighting an environment that 
stimulates active participation in programs and motivation to learn. It is from these contributions that the need 
for Unstructured Didactics (UD) arises, which draws on the application of applied educational practice, giving 
value to an interactive context in which the student can experience first-hand a certain notion, with a total 
involvement of the body in incorporating knowledge also in the presence of a specialized educator, able to 
guide the student in multidisciplinary acquisition, between the neuroscientific and the educational sphere. 
These strategies require student activation and promote the development of active cognitive processes through 
the analysis, evaluation, and application of knowledge (Bishop & Verleger, 2013). The traditional didactic 
activity offers clear advantages when it comes, for example, to convey a certain amount of information to many 
people. However, when the aim is to establish an exchange and not a mere conveyance of messages, generating 
a comparison, a discussion, and a learning-from-one-another, the traditional lesson (and its limits) must be 
rethought. The limits of the face-to-face lessons are obvious and easily identifiable: the student’s passivity; the 

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knowledge based on prolonged listening and repetition; the non-consideration of feedback and collaboration; 
the lack of interest in the different rhythms and learning styles. The face-to-face lesson is theoretically aimed at 
everyone, but actually, it is inevitably carried out for the average student and does not take into account the 
heterogeneity of the class. If the teacher can no longer be considered as a simple information-conveyer but, on 
the contrary, he is seen as a “researcher” (Shon, 2006) who, by continually reflecting on his way of teaching, 
learns how to improve his profession, then he becomes the “Director” of the learning process. Only in this way, 
the teaching-learning paradigm, from individualistic, will turn into collaborative, in which the student will also 
play an active and participatory role. It emerges, therefore, the need to move from methodologies, where the 
main actor turns out to be the teacher, to methodologies where the actors are the young guys and the teacher 
becomes more and more the director of the learning process. This is why we should change the 
teaching-learning model, turning it from individualistic-competitive into collaborative-democratic (Dewey, 
1916). Altet (2002) stated that the analysis of the didactic action requires the restoration of the functional 
articulation between teaching and learning situation, for the plurality of variables involved in the process, such 
as: the actors’ action, communication and control modality, the interactive methods of group management, and 
the transactions in the situation. Only a multidisciplinary approach can describe the different and specific 
dimensions of the teaching practice, and can make it possible to understand its articulation and functioning. A 
crucial problem for the teacher is how to organize learning experiences that contribute to increasing the 
understanding of cultural knowledge (Gardner, 1991), the critical sense and the autonomy of judgment (Walker, 
2003), the assumption of choices responsible for particular conditions and constraints (Renaud & Murray, 
2008); all this through a teaching activity meant as a source of knowledge re-elaboration and production. In 
relation to this, the educator should design the teaching activity based on the knowledge of the brain, resulting 
from cognitive neuroscience evidences proving that the development of the child’s nervous system takes place 
rapidly in the first year of life, then continuing in the years following a less accelerated pace. During this 
evolution, the mnemonic ability, thanks to the perceptive process, is enriched with elements coming from new 
explorative experiences, especially in a stimulating and motivational environment (Nagy, Westerberg, & 
Klingberg, 2004). Speaking of unstructured didactics, in the terms described above, we must take into account 
that, while distancing itself from traditional school activities, it enhances the participatory experience with the 
recognition and the ability to grasp links and associations also from the visual and motor point of view; recent 
research (Siegel, 2001; Oliviero, 2007) showed that motor activity induces the production of nutrients 
principles of the brain to develop synapses. The use of motor representations in learning, for example, would 
allow for the combination of motor, automatic and procedural memories (which are primary, solid, and 
long-lasting) with visual, visual-spatial, and semantic memories (the latter are late-arising, more fragile, and 
less lasting), through global didactic paths (Lucisano, Salerni, & Sposetti, 2013), since working memory is a 
system able to temporarily maintain information in active form, and represents the ability to perceive, acquire, 
archive and, at the same time, process information for highly complex cognitive operations. Among these, in 
addition to the visual-spatial skills, we can include those related to language, linguistic understanding, reading, 
problem solving and reasoning (Kane & Engle, 2002). Thus, according to a widely used model, working 
memory is a general domain component involved in a series of functions, such as attention and retrieval of 
information from long-term memory (Baddeley, 2000). All of this was supported in studies on children 
(Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006; Bayliss, Jarrold, Gunn, & Baddeley, 2003). If, for the visual-spatial 
sphere, the calculation and position-in-space skills are linked, the phonological loop is taken into consideration 

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for the learning of the early vocabulary (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998). Authors like Gathercole 
(1998), have shown that visual-spatial memory span grows regularly between 5 and 11 years, increasing by a 
unit every two years from one to three years, reaching the seven units at the age of 15, and then maintained in 
adulthood. Current studies show how the working memory, in its dynamism, can improve with practice. 
Growing evidence of scientific research leads to think that the working memory skill can be amplified with 
targeted training. Among these, St Clair-Thompson and his collaborators (2010) employed strategic training on 
groups of children in schools, training them practically on a variety of strategies (grouping tests, visual images), 
observing improvements in working memory, as well as in mental calculation, in the ability to follow the 
instructions of the activities. This type of training, in addition to having had benefits in children with typical 
development, has been a predictor of skills even in children with limited working memory skills. For example, 
with this type of intervention, we have seen how children with ADHD experienced reduced symptoms by 
improving cognitive control (Klingberg et al., 2005). Therefore, examples of strategic training, aimed at the 
ability to code and process, include grouping the elements into blocks, conceiving mental stories with the use of 
objects, and using images to make the objects more meaningful and salient. In line with these assumptions, it 
appears that the use of engaging, interactive, cooperative, and experiential didactic activities is functional, in a 
period in which the child’s language and memory skills are not yet sufficiently articulated. Scholars who dealt 
with linguistic development (Camaioni, 1993; D’amico & De Vescovi, 2013; Volterra, Caselli, Capirci, & 
Pizzuto, 2005) underlined how the evolution of phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic components is 
not parallel and uniform; in addition, they highlighted that the understanding skill development is a necessary 
prerequisite for the subsequent production skill formation. The development of the latter, according to the 
theory of the Embodied Cognition (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1992; Clark, 1997; Barsalou, 2008), the 
Language Motor Theory (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985), the language learning methodologies (Asher, 1969; 
Caforio, Carlin, & Cossaro, 2007), and the strengthening strategies (Capobianco, 2015) agrees on the primary 
role of the motor system in language development, given the fact that the Broca area, responsible for 
controlling ear-face movements, is very close to areas of the primary motor cortex, which would allow for its 
execution. The corroboration of the body in action for the linguistic domain, highlighted by neuroscientific 
evidence (D’Alessio & Minchillo, 2010), has led us to conceive how the interaction among mind, body, and 
environment, and human relationships generates changes at molecular level, with broad implications on 
language learning, according to the principle of brain plasticity. Once established that language is a system 
which gets shared with other individuals in a social situation favoring their development, for these 
characteristics, it finds fertile ground within the educational context, seen as the primary place of interaction 
and in which the child is required to take part daily. Based on these considerations, we work we are proposing 
aims at highlighting the importance of unstructured didactics aimed at stimulating the brain areas responsible 
for mnestic and linguistic processes in childhood, through the possibility of living an educational environment 
that leads to an improvement of cognitive performance in view of a qualitative inclusion in future learning.