ABSTRACT
Mistakes are normal and frequent by-products of learning in healthy individuals, but do they help or harm our ability to consciously learn and remember information? The recommendation that healthy older adults should avoid errors in the service of episodic memory is rooted in the clinical success of errorless (EL) learning. Baddeley A. D and Wilson B. A explained the benefit in terms of implicit memory. The memory performance of younger adults was at ceiling in both conditions. Research into the effects of error generation on episodic memory paints an optimistic picture: given the right conditions, younger and older adults can learn from their mistakes. Anderson N. D and Craik F. I. M used a process dissociation procedure to estimate the contributions of recollection and familiarity to EL and trial-and-error learning among healthy younger and older adults. Participants learned targets based on semantic categories in the conceptual condition, or word stems in the lexical condition, under EL and trial-and-error instructions.
