Prevention is better than cure: effects of errors on memory performance during spatial learning in healthy aging

Background Healthy aging is accompanied by a decline in learning ability and memory capacity. One widely-studied method to improve learning outcome is by reducing the occurrence of errors during learning (errorless learning; EL). However, there is also evidence that committing errors during learning (trial-and-error learning; TEL) may benefit memory performance. We argue that these inconsistent findings could be driven by a lack of control over the error frequency in traditional EL and TEL paradigms. Aim This study employed a spatial learning task to study EL and TEL and to determine the impact of error frequency on memory recall in healthy older adults (OA; N = 68) and young adults (YA; N = 60). Method Four groups of participants (YA-EL, YA-TEL, OA-EL, OA-TEL) were instructed to first place and memorize the locations of everyday objects in a chest of drawers presented on a computer screen, and in whom memory recall performance was later tested. In the TEL condition, the amount of errors made before the correct drawer was ‘found’ was predetermined, varying from 0 to 5. During the EL condition, every first attempt was correct (i.e., no errors were made). Results We found better overall performance in YA compared to OA and a beneficial effect of EL in both age groups. However, the amount of errors committed during learning did not influence accuracy of memory recall. Conclusion Our results indicate that elimination of errors during learning can benefit memory performance in both YA and OA compared to TEL.