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How should we approach making connections between research in psychology and neuroscience to inform educational practice? Aspects of psychology important to thinking memory, attention, and emotion have been studied extensively by interdisciplinary practitioners in psychology, however, not all components are equally supported by neuroscientific evidence. Further, consulting research findings in psychology or neuroscience to direct our instructional methodologies does not guarantee deeper, better, or more enhanced learning. If educators are to engage in evidence-based practice, they must empirically test psychological theory as it relates to teaching, thinking, and learning in the classroom, using neuroscience as an informative "road map" (Halpern & Hakel, 2003; Byrnes, 2001; Byrnes & Fox, 1998).

We must first determine which components of psychology are empirically corroborated by neuroscience in order to make the final connection: which instructional learning methodologies promote the psychological principles of critical thinking, formation of long-term memories, and successful transfer of learning?

MEMORY
Memory is fundamental to thinking and learning, and is therefore one of the most highly researched areas in psychology, which focuses on the study of mind and behavior. The psychological principles governing memory have been repeatedly tested empirically and are now accepted as valid and reliable models. Similarly, it is widely accepted by neuroscientists that the "neural basis" of memory represents the "storage" of information in new connections between neurons; the connectionist model was developed in an attempt to create cognitive theory of memory that mirrored the way the brain works. In the connectionist model, words and concepts are stored in vast networks consisting of nodes, and words are retrieved by a process of spreading activation of those networks. Indeed, the majority of these theories show a strong and reliable connection to neuroscientific findings. First, cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that information is stored in "codes." For example, dual-processing theory states that memory is stored in visual/spatial and auditory/verbal codes. Posner (in Byrnes, 2001) used PET (positron emission tomography) scans to demonstrate that deceptively simple stimuli such as simple words can illustrate memory "coding" in the brain: multiple areas in the occipital lobes were implicated when the participants were shown words "visually," wheras areas

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