Teaching is an intuitive social activity that requires reason-ing about and influencing the mind of others. A good teacherforms a belief about the knowledge of their student, asks clar-ifying questions, and gives instructions or explanations to tryto induce a target concept in the student’s mind. We proposePartially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)as a model of intuitive human teaching. According to this ac-count, teachers make pedagogical decisions with uncertaintyabout the knowledge state of their student. In two behavioralexperiments, human participants were tasked with balancingassessments (asking questions) and instructions to help teach astudent to build a tower of colored blocks. Human behavior inthe task was compared to the performance of a computerizedteaching algorithm optimized to solve the equivalent POMDP.Our results show that humans favor asking questions and estab-lishing common ground during teaching even at an economiccost and increase question asking as uncertainty grows.

Seizure-driven brain damage in epilepsy accumulates over time, especially in the hippocampus, which can lead to sclerosis, cognitive decline, and death. Excitotoxicity is the prevalent model to explain ictal neurodegeneration. Current labeling technologies cannot distinguish between excitotoxicity and hypoxia, however, because they share common molecular mechanisms. This leaves open the possibility that undetected ischemic hypoxia, due to ictal blood flow restriction, could contribute to neurodegeneration previously ascribed to excitotoxicity. We tested this possibility with Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) and novel stereological analyses in several models of epileptic mice. We found a higher number and magnitude of NG2+ mural-cell mediated capillary constrictions in the hippocampus of epileptic mice than in that of normal mice, in addition to spatial coupling between capillary constrictions and oxidative stressed neurons and neurodegeneration. These results reveal a role for hypoxia driven by capillary blood flow restriction in ictal neurodegeneration.