Dr Yow Wei Quin
Professor of Psychology
Head of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Programme Director, Design and Artificial Intelligence
Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Chair Professor in Healthcare Engineering
Co-Deputy Director, Centre for Healthcare Education, Entrepreneurship and Research
Singapore University of Technology and Design
Professor W. Quin YOW is currently Head of Humanities, Arts & Social Science at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and a visiting Senior Academician at the Changi General Hospital. She obtained her PhD (Psychology), MA (Psychology) and MSc (Statistics) from Stanford University, USA. Her main area of research is examining socio-cognitive development across the lifespan. She is interested in how our environment and habits shape our mind and behavior, and how our brain changes relative to our experiences across the lifespan and explore new or better ways for people to enhance their potential at every stage of their life. Professor Yow has published more than 80 international peer-refereed papers, conference proceedings and book chapters in top-tiered journals and conferences such as Developmental Science, Child Development, Journal of Gerontology Series B, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, Innovation in Aging, Frontiers in Psychology, Cognitive Development, GSA, SRCD, Cognitive Science Society, etc., in the area of social cognition, bilingualism, technology and aging. She currently serves as the Associate Editor for Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, as well as the Associate Editor for Innovation in Aging. She is also a consulting Editor for Child Development, co-Chair of Publications Committee, SRCD.
Keynote
Topic: Minds, Machines, and Human Learning in an AI-Driven World
Artificial intelligence is changing how knowledge is produced, accessed, and applied — and classrooms are no exception. As AI tools spread rapidly across schools and institutions, a question that deserves attention is whether the technology entering our learning environments is actually built around how humans learn.
Human learning is not simply the production of correct answers. It is effortful and emotionally textured, shaped by social context, cultural experience, attention, trust, and judgement. Drawing from almost twenty years of research in cognitive science and developmental psychology, Professor Yow examines work with children and older adults — exploring how young children decide whose knowledge to trust, and how culturally-appropriate engagement and technology-based intervention may support social cognition and learning in ageing.
The keynote examines whether the future of learning should be framed not as a choice between human and machine intelligence, but as a co-evolution. Drawing on a human-centred lens, it asks what AI in education must preserve, not merely what it can deliver: the effortful processes that make learning lasting; the evaluative skills that distinguish information from understanding; and sensitivity to learner diversity — across languages, ages, and cognitive profiles. The deeper question may not be what AI can do, but what it means to learn well as a human being — and how, in an AI-driven world, we keep that question alive.