TRIAL-AND-ERROR LEARNING BEST FOR OLDER BRAINS
A Rotman Research Institute study, published in Psychology and Aging, has found the first evidence that older brains get more benefit than younger brains from learning information the hard way – through trial-and-error learning.
WATCH VIRTUAL BRAIN MOVES INTO SECOND PHASE
The ongoing Virtual Brain project being led by Baycrest is a step closer to creating a predictive modelling tool that will change how we assess and rehabilitate the brains of people who have suffered damage from stroke, epilepsy or the early stages of Alzheimer's.
The Virtual Brain – which may be a world first – will be com- pletely customized to an individual patient's brain. The goal is to safely devise, benchmark and test pharmaceutical and surgical therapies before they are applied. In November 2011, Dr. Randy McIntosh, lead scientist in the international consor- tium for the project, demonstrated the Virtual Brain to more than 32,000 scientists and physicians at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C. In March this year, the first "teaser" version of the virtual brain software was made available for downloading by clinicians and researchers.
"We are moving into the second phase, which involves collect- ing data from brains with disease, damage or degeneration in order to build the capacity of the virtual brain to model these states," explains Dr. McIntosh. By 2013, the project team will be ready to demonstrate the effects of stroke and epilepsy on the brain to neuroscientists and clinicians in Europe.
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"We are moving into the second phase, which involves collecting data from brains with disease, damage or degeneration in order to build the capacity of the virtual brain to model these states."
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RRI senior scientist Dr. Nicole Anderson is the study's senior au- thor and a specialist in cognitive rehabilitation in older adults.
"The scientific literature has tradition- ally embraced errorless learning for older adults. However, our study has shown that if older adults are learning material that is very conceptual, where they can make a meaningful asso- ciation between their errors and the correct information they are supposed to remember, in those cases the errors can actually help the learning process," says lead investigator and doctoral student Andreé-Ann Cyr.
The study showed that the memory benefits for older adults from trial- and-error learning – compared with passive errorless learning – were about 2.5 times greater than for young adults. These findings may have important implications for how information is taught to older adults in the classroom and for rehabilitation methods aimed at delaying cognitive decline, says Cyr.
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2011/12 Baycrest and Baycrest Foundation Annual Report 17
