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Making mistakes while learning can benefit your ability to remember facts (stock image) and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close, researchers claim

Making mistakes while learning can boost your ability to remember facts and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close, researchers claim.

A new study suggests that random guesses can actually harm people's ability to remember a correct answer.

But overall, it provides evidence that trial-and-error learning can benefit memory in both young and old.

'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,' said Andrée-Ann Cyr, a graduate student at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.

The research, which is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, builds upon her previous work that found learning information by making mistakes is the best method for older people when trying to remember facts.

Her first study raised eyebrows because scientific literature has traditionally recommended that older adults avoid making mistakes, unlike their younger peers who benefit from them.

The latest study provides evidence that trial-and-error learning can benefit memory in both young and old when errors are meaningfully related to the right answer. But they can harm memory when they are not.

In her experiment, 65 healthy younger adults with an average age of 22, and 64 healthy older adults with an average age of 72, learned target words such as 'rose' based either on the semantic category it belongs to – flower – or its word stem – a word that begins with the letters 'ro'.

For half of the words, participants were given the answer right away and for the other half, they were asked to guess at it before seeing the answer. They were asked, for example, 'is it a tulip' or for ro…, 'is it a rope?'

The latest study provides evidence that trial-and-error learning can benefit memory in both young and old when errors are meaningfully related to the right answer, based on an experiment involving the world 'rose' - a rose is pictured. But they can harm memory when they are not

In a later memory test, participants were shown the categories or word stems and were asked for the correct answer.

The researchers were interested in whether the participants were better at remembering a word if they had made close, but wrong, guess, rather than getting the answer correct on their first attempt.

They discovered that guessing made memory worse when words were learned based on word stems in both younger and older adults.

Ms Cyr and her colleagues think this is because our memory organises 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.

Therefore, wrong guesses are only useful 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 of rose, because they are both flowers.

They discovered that guessing made memory worse when words were learned based on word stems in both older and younger adults (stock image). Ms Cyr and her colleagues think this is because our memory organises information based on how it is conceptually rather than lexically related to other information

Ms Cyr said that by guessing first as opposed to just reading the answer, people have to think harder about the information and make useful connections that can help memory.

The study revealed 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 had letters in common with answers, they cluttered a person's memory because they could not cannot link them meaningfully. The word rope is nowhere close to rose in our memory.

'The fact that this pattern was found for older adults as well shows that ageing does not influence how we learn from mistakes,' Ms Cyr said.

Dr Nicole Anderson, senior scientist with Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute and a co-author of the study, 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.

'They also provide great hope for lifelong learning and guidance for how seniors should study.'