Making mistakes while learning may help retain new information, according to a recent study.
Researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada found that making mistakes while learning People with mental health disorders are more likely to have heart disease or stroke.
"Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer, but near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information - and this benefit is seen in younger and older adults," Andrée-Ann Cyr, lead investigator of the study and a graduate student with Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.
For the study, 65 healthy younger adults and 64 healthy older adults learned target words (ex. Rose) based either on the semantic category it belongs to (e.g., a flower) or its word stem (e.g., a word that begins with the letters 'ro'). For half of the words, participants were given the answer right away (e.g., "the answer is rose") and for the other half, they were asked to guess at it before seeing the answer (e.g., a flower: "Is it tulip?" or ro___: "is it rope?"). On a memory test, participants were shown the categories or word stems and had to come up with the right answer.
The researchers wanted to know if participants would be better at remembering rose if they had made wrong guesses prior to studying it rather than seeing it right away. They found that this was only true if participants learned based on the categories (e.g., a flower). Guessing actually made memory worse when words were learned based on word stems (e.g., ro___). This was the case for both younger and older adults.
Cyr and her research team suggest this is because people's memory organizes information based on how it is conceptually rather than lexically related to other information.
"For example, when you think of the word pear, your mind is more likely to jump to another fruit, such as apple, than to a word that looks similar, such as peer," researchers said in the study. "Wrong guesses only add value when they have something meaningful in common with right answers. The guess tulip may be wrong, but it is still conceptually close to the right answer rose (both are flowers)."
By guessing first, as opposed to just reading, one is thinking harder about the information and making useful connections that can help memory.
They found that younger and older participants were more likely to remember the answer if they also remembered their wrong guesses, suggesting that these acted as stepping stones. By contrast, when guesses only have letters in common with answers, they clutter memory because one cannot link them meaningfully.
"The fact that this pattern was found for older adults as well shows that aging does not influence how we learn from mistakes," Cyr said. "These results have profound clinical and practical implications. They turn traditional views of best practices in memory rehabilitation for healthy seniors on their head by demonstrating that making the right kind of errors can be beneficial."
The findings will be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
