Beware- your mind is playing a trick on your brain !
Perception....Attention..... ADHD..... what does all of this have to do with my teaching? In my quest to understand how all of these concepts intersected in the pedagogy of dental education, I stumbled upon Perceptual Learning! Why is perception important in dentistry? Syrimi, M., & Ali, N. (2015). The role of stereopsis (three-dimensional vision) in dentistry: review of the current literature. British dental journal, 218(10), 597–598. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2015.387 This article explains that perception especially, depth and distance perception are part of hand-eye coordination that is crucial for success as a clinician. The same study concluded that it is possible for students who lack spatial awareness to practice visual acuity and perform the same tasks efficiently, as compared to those who were initially at a higher level of perception. This is because of the brain's neuroplasticity! What about individuals with ADHD and spatial awareness? Depth perception is an important aspect of spatial awareness and there are some studies that correlate poor spatial awareness in individuals with ADHD. The right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for perception and alertness and persons with ADHD have some degree of dysfunction in this hemisphere resulting in poor perception. Kalanthroff, E., Naparstek, S., & Henik, A. (2013). Spatial processing in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Neuropsychology, 27(5), 546–555. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033655 What is Perceptual Learning? How could you adopt this in dental education? Kellman P. J. (2013). Adaptive and perceptual learning technologies in medical education and training. Military medicine, 178(10 Suppl), 98–106. https://doi.org/10.7205/MILMED-D-13-00218 This was an eye-opening article because it connected perception, selective attention and pedagogy and andragogy! Dental students get a large amount of instruction in the didactic courses that is called declarative knowledge. They practice hand skills in the simulation lab that gives them the procedural knowledge. Despite this vast knowledge base, what they struggle with is the critical reasoning that fills the gap between declarative knowledge and the procedural knowledge. This study talks about “Perceptual Learning” which was coined by Eleanor Gibson in 1963, as a relatively permanent and consistent change in the perception of a stimulus array, following practice or experience with this array”. PL explains how an expert clinician would quickly talk to a dental patient, do a thorough exam, and arrive at a diagnosis and treatment plan while a novice would take longer and may not know how to connect the relevant information. This is because the novice lacks the perception to weed out the irrelevant info from the relevant info to connect the dots. They are lacking the selectivity in attention!!! Multiple disciplines in pre-clinical education could adopt this type of learning methodology. As an example, you could create an online module on radiographic interpretation, require the students to identify the structures and filling materials on teeth, slowly scale up to identify caries and other pathology. This pattern recognition, when practiced could help students develop that perceptual learning that leads to superior clinical reasoning skills. Ciao…. for now…. I will be back !
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