“To err is human, to forgive is divine, to rectify is wise,” said the poet Alexander Pope. Perhaps erring is also wise. According to a team of researchers from the Baycrest Foundation in Toronto (Canada) who have carried out a study on the connection between learning, memory and knowledge, they have concluded that making mistakes in the learning process can benefit memory but only if our replies are close to the correct answer and are not merely random answers .
To reach this conclusion, the researchers involved 65 healthy young adults with a mean age of 22 years and 64 healthy older adults with a mean age of 72 years . The participants learned words based on the semantic category to which certain objects belonged (rose, flower), adding the correct answer to them immediately. In addition, they also had to relate those words to the lexical similarity of others (for example: pear, pairs) Later, the memory test came. The researchers showed images of the previously learned objects and the participants had to figure out what it was about, that is, if they remembered it clearly. They found that if the learning had been based on word categories, they were more likely to retrieve the answer than if it were lexical similarities .
According to the researchers, this occurs because our memory organizes information based on the form, on the conceptualization of that data. Thus, it was more natural that even if they did not remember the correct answer, in this case “pear”, another fruit would come to mind and not a word that lexically resembles the correct answer such as “pairs”. Thus, saying “apple”, when in reality the figure was a “pear”, brought the participants closer to the correct answer in later tests, because they remembered their previous conjectures – wrong but close -.
Learning by trial and error seems to be the key to reinforcing current knowledge , if our mistakes are related to the correct answer but can also damage memory if these answers are not related in the least, according to the authors.
“Making random guesses does not seem to benefit memory after the correct answer, but getting closer to the answer does seem to act as a springboard to retrieving the correct information – and this benefit is seen in both younger and older adults. older, ”says Andrée-Ann Cyr, study leader.
The article has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology .
