A new study has observed that making mistakes while learning can actually sharpen the memory and lead to the correct answer, but only with very close guesses.
Lead investigator Andree-Ann Cyr, a graduate student with Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, said that making random guesses did not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer , but near-miss guesses acted as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information and this benefit was seen in younger and older adults.
The researchers approached 65 healthy younger adults (average age 22) and 64 healthy older adults (average age 72) learned target words (e.g., 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?").
Cyr's latest research provides evidence that trial-and-error learning could benefit memory in both young and old when errors were meaningfully related to the right answer, and could actually harm memory when they were not.
Participants were shown the categories or word stems and had to come up with the right answer and 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.
The study is posted online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.