Making mistakes can help people remember better while the process of learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, said Andrée-Ann Cyr, a graduate student from the Rotman Research Institute in Ontario, Canada, and her colleagues.

"Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer, but near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information--and this benefit is seen in younger and older adults," said Cyr, the lead investigator of the study.

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Her new research expands on a previous study published in 2013 that found learning information by making mistakes, in comparison to just being told what is right, may be the best process for learning in older brains.

Cyr's findings were the exact opposite of traditional scientific literature that recommends older minds should avoid making mistakes, unlike younger minds that could actually benefit from the errors.

Recent evidence uncovered by the scientists is changing the perspective and are making teachers and cognitive rehabilitation clinicians take note.

The latest study by Cyr offers evidence that learning through trial and error can benefit both old and young brains when mistakes are significantly related to the correct answer. Mistakes, however, can harm one's memory when they are not.

In the research, 64 older adults averaging at 72-years old and 65 younger adults averaging 22-years old, learned specific words. These words were based on either the word's stem, starting from the first few letters of the word, or by the semantic category to which the word belongs.

When answering the wrong word, half of the young and old participants were asked to guess the word using the criteria, while the other half was immediately given the right answer.

On later tests of memory, participants that were shown the word stems or categories were able to guess the correct answers.  Scientists wanted to find out if the participants were better at remembering words by word stems or by categories.

They discovered the group given the categories was better at remembering the word, while the group that guessed from word stems performed worse. This was the case for both older and younger adults.

The research team suggests that because human memory organizes information based on how information is related conceptually to the actual word rather than lexically.

For example, if the word is "pear," the brain can easily associate it with another fruit, such as "apple," instead of a word that looks similar, such as "peer."

Wrong guesses only have value when mistakes only have something meaningful in common with the right answers.

"The fact that this pattern was found for older adults as well shows that aging does not influence how we learn from mistakes," said Cyr.

Tagsbrain, Research, Memory, Old brain, Young brain, Cognitive therapy