A new brain study suggests that children under the age of 8 aren’t really able to learn from their mistakes. This Dutch study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, illustrates that younger brains learn differently.
The brains of adults and 12- and 13-year-olds are more strongly activated by negative feedback, but the brains of eight- and nine-year-olds barely registered it and instead were triggered much more strongly by positive feedback.
Scientists conducting the study were surprised at the results. “We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well. Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?”
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