Afterword: Emotional reason: Challenging cognitivism in education

Abstract

In 2004 R. W. Picard and nine colleagues at the MIT Media Lab published “Affective Learning – A Manifesto” that registered a challenge to cognitive theories recognizing the way that the computer as model and metaphor had tended to skew research on learning as a form of information processing by privileging the “cognitive” over the “affective.” The manifesto attempted to redress the imbalance to support an increasingly research-based “view of affect as complexly intertwined with cognition in guiding rational behaviour, memory retrieval, decision-making, creativity, and more” (Picard, 2004). They wanted to build new learning systems that used affect as a basis for new education and machine learning. They noted that “the extension of cognitive theory to explain and exploit the role of affect in learning is in its infancy.”