Saturday, November 05, 2016

Older adolescents and adults can learn certain thinking skills including non-verbal reasoning more effectively than younger people

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-11/ucl-odb110216.php

Public Release: 4-Nov-2016
Older dogs better at learning new tricks
Older adolescents and adults can learn certain thinking skills including non-verbal reasoning more effectively than younger people
University College London

Older adolescents and adults can learn certain thinking skills including non-verbal reasoning more effectively than younger people, finds new UCL (University College London) research.

The study, published in Psychological Science, also highlights the fact that non-verbal reasoning skills can be readily trained and do not represent an innate, fixed ability.

"Although adults and older adolescents benefitted most from training in non-verbal reasoning, the average test score for adolescents aged 11-13 improved from 60% to 70% following three weeks of ten-minute online training sessions," says senior author Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "This calls into question the claim that entry tests for selective schools that include non-verbal reasoning 'assess the true potential of every child'."

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"We find that these cognitive skills, which are related to mathematics performance, show greater training effects in late adolescence than earlier in adolescence," explains co-lead author Dr Lisa Knoll. "These findings highlight the relevance of this late developmental stage for education and challenge the assumption that earlier is always better for learning. We find that fundamental cognitive skills related to mathematics can be significantly trained in late adolescence."

At the testing stages, volunteers were tested on various tasks, not just the ones they had trained in, to see if the training effects transferred to other skills. No transfer effects were observed, suggesting that the effect of training was specific to each task.

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