You can teach an old dog new tricks

[Euler]

Summary: -

The paper addresses a deeply practical question, which is how the mind changes as it gets older. It’s easy to complain about the lapses of age: the lost keys, the vanished names, the forgotten numbers. But perhaps these shortcomings come with a consolation.

Older adults did a lot better on the test overall. While the young group only got 26 percent of questions correct, the aged subjects got 41 percent. This is to be expected: the mind a
accumulates facts over time, slowly filling up with stray bits of knowledge.

Why did older adults score so much higher on the retest? The answer is straightforward: they paid more attention to what they got wrong. They were more interested in their ignorance, more likely to notice what they didn’t know. While younger subjects were most focused on their high-confidence errors – those mistakes that catch us by surprise – older subjects were more likely to consider every error, which allowed them to remember more of the corrections.

Metcalfe and colleagues speculate that something else is going on, and that older adults are simply “unwilling or unable to recruit their efforts to learn irrelevant mumbo jumbo.” In short, they have less patience for silly lab tasks. However, when senior citizens are given factually correct information to remember – when they are asked to learn the truth – they can rally their attention and memory. The old dog can still learn new tricks. The tricks just have to be worth learning.

http://www.jonahlehrer.com/blog/2015/11 ... arn-better

[sam8080]

What do you mean by "high-confidence errors"?