The part of brain that is able to identify a lack of understanding in other people has identified by researchers, which will help to deliver insight into how teachers are able to pick up incomprehension in their pupils.

They discovered during their tests that the anterior cingulate cortex is the part of the brain that is able to pick up cues that suggest another individual is having trouble understanding something.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, documented the efforts of the team from Royal Holloway, University of London.

They asked volunteers to consider themselves to be teachers during experiments and were tasked with spotting when students made correct or incorrect decisions while playing a video game.

Using mathematical modelling, they analysed, using an MRI scan, how the volunteer teachers gauged "how wrong the students' beliefs were about their responses".

"For teachers, understanding what your students believe is a vital part of the teaching process, allowing meaningful and useful feedback to be provided", commented lead author Dr Matthew Apps.

"Our study has identified some of the key structures and computations in the human brain that are important for teaching. These findings provide the foundations for understanding how the brain works when people are teaching others, which may allow us to develop tools in future to help teachers guide the learning of their students."

Professor Narender Ramnani, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, added that while everyone's formative years are often shaped during their childhood interactions with teachers, very little is in fact known about the way in which teachers think.

He concluded: "These findings have implications for understanding how the brains of teachers compute errors in their students' understanding, and how teachers provide feedback that guides student learning."