Older people better at correcting their mistakes

Elderly people are not considered wiser for nothing. They are actually better at correcting their mistakes as compared to those younger, a new study finds.

It is generally believed that older adults are not good at learning new things. But the new study challenges this notion as it showed 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," said 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," they added.

The researchers recruited 44 young adults (around 24 years old) and 45 older adults (around 74 years old) to participate in the study.

The participants were presented with a series of general information questions that covered a variety of topics.

After the first round of quiz, where the participants were provided correct answers to the questions in which they erred, a surprise retest was done.

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

"They (older people) care very much about the truth, they don't want to make mistakes, and they recruit their attention to get it right," Metcalfe and Friedman noted.

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.