Older beats younger when it comes to correcting mistakes

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/afps-oby102815.php

Public Release: 28-Oct-2015
Older beats younger when it comes to correcting mistakes
Association for Psychological Science

Findings from a new study challenge the notion that older adults always lag behind their younger counterparts when it comes to learning new things. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that older adults were actually better than young adults at correcting their mistakes on a general information quiz.

"The take home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults. Correcting their factual errors--all of their errors--is one of them," say psychological scientists Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman of Columbia University, who conducted the study. "There is such a negative stereotype about older adults' cognitive abilities but our findings indicate that reality may not be as bleak as the stereotype implies."

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As expected, the results showed that older adults were better at answering the general knowledge questions--on average, they answered 41% of the questions correctly, while the young adults got only 26% right. Older adults also tended to be more confident in their answers, but both age groups reported greater confidence in the answers they ended up getting right than the ones that they got wrong.

The findings showed that older adults corrected more errors overall than the young adults did, indicating that they were better at updating their existing knowledge with new information. 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.

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