The answer
is yes. A study led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on
this essential part of learning “making mistakes” and how it helps one in
learning faster. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some
people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes than others?
After all everybody screws up. But what follows is important. Do we ignore the
mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we
investigate the error seeking to learn from the snafu?
The Moser experiment is premised on the
fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be
reliably detected using electroencephalography (EEG). The first reaction is known
as error related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a
screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk
of tissue that helps monitor behaviour, anticipate rewards and regulate
attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response
to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe),
arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is
associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error,
dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have
shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two
properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the
mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably
paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.
In this new paper, Moser et al. extends
this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly
involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less
than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first
proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research,
Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mind-set — they tend to agree
with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot
do much to change it” — and those with a growth mind-set, who believe that we
can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and
energy. While people with a fixed mind-set see mistakes as a dismal failure — a
sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a
growth mind-set see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine
of education.
The experiment began with a flanker task, a
tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter
of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter
is the same as the other four, and sometimes it’s different. This simple change
induces frequent mistakes, as the boring task encourages people to zone out.
Once they make a mistake, of course, they immediately regret it. There is no
excuse for misidentifying a letter.
While performing the flanker task, subjects
wore an EEG cap, a monitoring device filled with greased electrodes that
records electrical activity in the brain. (Unlike fMRI, EEG gives researchers
excellent temporal resolution, allowing them to precisely measure a sequence of
neural events. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of spatial resolution,
making it difficult to know where in the brain the signals are coming from.)
It turned out that those subjects with a
growth mind-set were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a
result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most
interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a
growth mind-set generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased
attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mind-set
generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mind-set were closer
to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with
improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends
in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong,
they learned how to get it right.
