Category: Learning

Seniors prove that age doesn’t dull all cognitive skills.

Older people are better at correcting their mistakes on a general knowledge quiz.

It’s not just that seniors know more, it’s that they are better at correcting themselves when they initially get it wrong.

Indeed older people were better, on average, at learning the true answers regardless of how confident they were initially.

Perhaps with age we learn humility when it comes to memory.

Two of the study’s authors, Dr Janet Metcalfe and Dr David Friedman of Columbia University, said:

“The take home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults.

Correcting their factual errors — all of their errors — is one of them.

There is such a negative stereotype about older adults’ cognitive abilities but our findings indicate that reality may not be as bleak as the stereotype implies.”

The researchers were inspired by a quirk in how we correct mistakes in our learning.

It turns out that when we’re really confident about an answer which we discover is wrong, we are more likely to correct it.

Called the ‘hypercorrection effect’, it probably stems from our motivation to be consistent.

Mastering memory mistakes

In the study, around 500 older and younger people were given a series of general knowledge questions.

After answering, people said how confident they were about the answer.

What emerged was that older people were better at correcting the errors they’d made on low-confidence questions.

Younger people, though, were more likely to learn only from the wrong answers they were almost sure were correct.

Older people learned just as well from these as they did from the answers they were not confident about.

Brain scans during the tests revealed that it was down to the way older people paid attention.

Drs Metcalfe and Friedman said:

“They care very much about the truth, they don’t want to make mistakes, and they recruit their attention to get it right.

To be sure, older adults should be heartened by our results–the older adults did splendidly in our study.

But we all grow old, so younger adults should be encouraged, too.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Metcalfe et al., 2015).

Unlock faster skill mastery with one small adjustment.

Making small changes to practice helps people learn skills twice as fast, research finds.

Small adjustments to practice work much better than practicing in the same way over-and-over again.

For example, those learning the piano can play slightly louder and softer or slightly faster and slower.

Those learning a sport can make small changes to equipment or rules to create variation.

Learning is enhanced by forcing the mind to adapt to changes.

Professor Pablo A. Celnik, study co-author, said:

“What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”

For the study, 86 people learned to use a pinching movement to move a cursor across a computer screen.

Some simply practiced in exactly the same way again and again, while others had the task modified slightly.

The modification was that people needed to apply slightly different forces, so that they were constantly adapting.

Small modifications to practice almost doubled people’s speed and accuracy, the results revealed.

Professor Celnik said:

“Our results are important because little was known before about how reconsolidation works in relation to motor skill development.

This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger motor skill gains because of reconsolidation.

The goal is to develop novel behavioral interventions and training schedules that give people more improvement for the same amount of practice time.”

Other studies suggest only small tweaks to practice will work, Professor Celnik said:

“If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation.

The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Wymbs et al., 2016).

Study of workplace stress finds there’s a better way to cope than relaxation.

Learning something new is a better way to deal with stress than relaxing, research finds.

The study of workplace stress compared it with simple relaxation strategies like taking a break or listening to some music.

It emerged that learning something new worked better as a stress buffer and helped people manage their negative emotions.

Ms Chen Zhang, the study’s first author, said:

“When jobs are consistently stressful, managers may feel that they are rather constrained in trying to reduce transgressions in the workplace.”

People in the study were working in a variety of industries, including healthcare, finance and education.

Relaxation had its place — it did help people calm their minds and it reduced tiredness.

Learning something new was better, though, Ms Zhang said:

“When it comes to addressing negative emotions and actions in stressful work environments, building positive resources by learning something new at work could be more useful than relaxing.

When an individual comes out of relaxation activities at work and realizes the stressful situation hasn’t changed, it may generate frustration and reverse the benefits of relaxation.”

Learning something new works as a resource-builder.

Ms Zhang said:

“Managers may want to offer opportunities for employees to learn new things in their work.

Similarly, employees who wish to prevent their own conduct from falling prey to stressful factors can also seek ways to learn something new in their everyday work.”

So, at this very moment you are busting stress much more effectively by reading about this study than you would be otherwise.

Well done!

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Zhang et al., 2018).