We bring together four researchers who study exper-tise in team or in solo (i.e., individual) performance. Teamresearch tends to either collect a lot of questionnaire dataafter performance or a little data, in real-time, by humanobservers. Studies of solo performers are often restrictedto convenience samples of task novices, who often spendless than an hour learning and performing the task. Incontrast, the research of all four of our panelists is no-table for using tasks which require days-to-years of prac-tice and for the quantities of data collected. Discussionswill emphasize the contributions these approaches aremaking to theoretical cognitive science.

Does neuroscience have the potential to inform education? In this debate, three participants will describe emerging results in neuroscience with translatable links to learning and memory. Experts in learning sciences will discuss connections as well as limits in the ways that neuroscience can inform education at the individual and classroom levels. Although significant progress has been made in our understanding of how the brain learns and remembers, the question for this symposium is whether this progress does or can provide a direct bridge from brain science to education.

Why games? How could anyone consider action gamesas experimental paradigms for Cognitive Science? In 1973,as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cogni-tive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a singlecomplex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told usthat rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usualapproach” that, we should “focus on a series of experimentaland theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as todemonstrate that our theories of human cognition were pow-erful enough to explain, “a genuine slab of human behavior”with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Ac-tion games represent the type of experimental paradigms thatNewell was advocating and the current state of programmingexpertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emer-gence of Big Data (Griffiths, 2015) and Naturally OccurringData Sets (NODS, Goldstone & Lupyan, 2016), provide thetechnologies and data needed to realize his vision. ActionGames enable us to escape from our field’s regrettable fo-cus on novice performance to develop theories that accountfor the full range of expertise through a twin focus on ex-pertise sampling (across individuals) and longitudinal studies(within individuals) of simple and complex tasks.This Symposium is inspired by the recent Action Gamesas Experimental Paradigms for Cognitive Science (Game-XP), issue of Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS), April2017. It includes late-breaking work from some of the re-searchers represented in that topic as well as new work bynew researchers.

Neurons are exquisitely specialized for rapid electrical transmission of signals, but some properties of glial cells, which do not communicate with electrical impulses, are well suited for participating in complex cognitive functions requiring broad spatial integration and long-term temporal regulation. Astrocytes, microglia, and oligodendrocytes all have biological properties that could influence learning and cognition. Myelination by oligodendrocytes increases conduction velocity, affecting spike timing and oscillations in neuronal activity. Astrocytes can modulate synaptic transmission and may couple multiple neurons and synapses into functional assemblies. Microglia can remove synapses in an activity-dependent manner altering neural networks. Incorporating glia into a bicellular mechanism of nervous system function may help answer long-standing questions concerning the cellular mechanisms of learning and cognition.