Older generations better at learning than everyone else
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defines the essence of wisdom. He argues that wisdom us ultimately the awareness of ignorance.
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
It turns out that Socrates’ tale of two men now has some scientific reasoning to it. A new study, published in Psychological Science, shows that older adults were actually better than young adults at correcting their mistakes on a general information quiz.
The study focused on the participant’s abilities to learn from their factual errors. The scientist gave 44 young adults (average age of 24) and 45 older adults (average age 73) more than 400 general information questions. For example, ‘name the ancient city with the hanging gardens’. After each question, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to 10 how confident they were with their answer. They were then shown the correct answer. During this, the subjects were fitted with an EEG cap, a device able to measure the waves of electrical activity generated by the brain.
The second part of the experiment was a short re test. The participants were asked 20 of their high confident errors-questions that they thought were right but they actually got wrong – and 20 low confidence errors, or those questions they suspected they didn’t know.
The results were surprising for some. Not only did the older participants score higher in the quiz (they answered 41 per cent of the questions correctly, while the young adults got only 26 per cent right) but they also seemed to pay closer attention to their mistakes.
On the second round, older adults corrected more errors overall than the young adults did, meaning that they were more likely to learn from their errors and update their existing knowledge.
More importantly, they also corrected more of their low-confidence errors. Together, these findings indicate that the older adults were less susceptible to the hypercorrection effect than younger adults were.
Both age groups also showed a large P3a component-a brain eave indicating attentional processing. However, older adults produced a larger P3a to low confidence error feedback, signalling that they cared more about the truth and genuinely bettering their knowledge.
These results may challenge some common beliefs about older adult’s cognitive abilities, but it also provides a little optimism. If you want to be good at learning new things, all you have to do is try.
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