General knowledge quiz: Older generation beats younger at correcting mistakes in Columbia University study

Scientists at the University of Liege looked at two different cognitive tasks to compare the performance of human brains across the seasons (Getty)

While many of us go for the notion that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, it seems that older adults may be ahead of their younger counterparts when it comes to learning from their mistakes.

A new study published in Psychological Science by Columbia University found that an older generation of adults were better at correcting errors on a general knowledge quiz.

Psychological scientists Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman of Columbia University, who conducted the study, said there was a "negative stereotype" about older adults’ cognitive abilities, but their findings suggest the reality “may not be as bleak as the stereotype implies”.

Metcalfe, Friedman and their colleagues were interested in exploring a phenomenon known as the “hypercorrection effect”, which suggests that people who are confident about an answer that turns out to be wrong will correct it. Meanwhile, someone who is initially unsure about the answer will be less likely to do so.

The researchers recruited 44 young adults with an average age of 24, and 45 older adults aged around 64-years-old, none of whom had a history or symptoms of neurological or psychiatric disorders.

All were fitted with an EEG cap and presented with a series of general knowledge questions covering a variety of topics, and encouraged to guess when they were unsure about the answer. They were asked to rate how confident they were on their answer in a 7 point scale before being given the correct answer, during which time their brain activity was measured.

After this the EEC cap was removed and participants were given a retest featuring questions that led to high-confidence errors, low-confidence errors, and questions that were unanswered.

Older adults corrected more errors overall than the young adults did, which indicates they were better at updating existing knowledge with new information, and they also corrected more of their low-confidence errors, which suggested they were less susceptible to the hypercorrection effect than younger adults.

Based on these findings we put together a (much less scientific/not scientific at all) quiz to see if we can guess your age group, based on general knowledge questions. See how you get on: