OVO

Science Daily: Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests [LINK-ZUM]

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently. [...] In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and scarcely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their 'control centres' in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback. [...]

Is that difference between eight- and twelve-year-olds the result of experience, or does it have to do with the way the brain develops? As yet, nobody has the answer. 'This kind of brain research has only been possible for the last ten years or so,' says Crone, 'and there are a lot more questions which have to be answered. But it is probably a combination of the brain maturing and experience.' There is also an area of the brain that responds strongly to positive feedback: the basal ganglia, just outside the cerebral cortex. The activity of this area of the brain does not change. It remains active in all age groups: in adults, but also in children, both eight-year-olds and twelve-year-olds.

[Article continues at link. This information touches on so much of interest to me. I work in public schools and so I am around children of these ages. My job in public schools is that of a sign language interpreter. What might it mean if Deaf children get little linguistic feedback as they develop because their parents don't sign with them and neither do most of their peers? I also have a strong interest in evidence for and against the claim that behavior and consciousness have biological roots. I have many questions and few answers, so I think I'm learning. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: deaf, education, science

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