News |
Mind & Brain
Researchers have used imaging technology to spy
on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how
we might learn from our mistakes.
By Charles Q. Choi
|
April 27, 2012 |
Image: flickr/Olly Newport
Firm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a
phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that
turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain
imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during
hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn
from our errors.
To understand hypercorrection, says cognitive psychologist
Janet Metcalfe
at Columbia University, "suppose I ask you, 'What is the capital of
Canada ?' and you say 'Toronto. ' I say, 'How confident are you?' and
you say, 'Very highly confident.' When I then tell you that actually the
capital is Ottawa, you're very likely to remember it— not just a few
minutes later but weeks later, and maybe for much longer, we think."
Scientists reason that in hypercorrection, after people discover that
ideas they felt very sure about were not in fact correct, the surprise
and embarrassment they feel makes them pay special attention to
alternative responses about which they felt less confident . People then
go on to take the corrected information to heart, learning from their
errors.
"In contrast, if I asked you a question to which you gave a
not-very-confident answer, like, perhaps, 'What color does amethyst turn
when it is heated?' and you say, 'blue' with low confidence, when I
tell you that it's actually yellow, you're not very likely to remember
it," Metcalfe says.
Given this model , to learn more about what happens in the brain during
hypercorrection, Metcalfe and her colleagues focused on brain regions
linked to attention as well as those involved in metacognition (self-
awareness of the thought process ) . The researchers used functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 14 volunteers
while they answered nearly 600 general information questions that had
single-word answers. The participants then rated their confidence on
their responses.
"My favorite—'What is the last name of the Oscar award –winning actor
who thanked his parents for not using birth control?' '[Dustin]
Hoffman,'" Metcalfe says.
The scientists found evidence supporting their hypercorrection model.
Both wrong answers and right answers lit up the anterior cingulate and
medial frontal gyrus, parts of the brain linked with attention and
metacognition .
"The anterior cingulate registers our surprise and maybe something that
we might, roughly, call embarrassment, and so we gear up all our
resources to better encode 'Ottawa,'" Metcalfe says, referring to her
previous geography quiz . The region did not, however, activate as
strongly for wrong answers about which subjects initially felt low
confidence, suggesting that the participants would be less likely to
remember corrections to such answers.
The medial frontal gyrus is involved in social processes, suggesting a role in hypercorrection is as well.
"This makes a lot of sense—a lot of our knowledge comes from other people and books, and from consensus and encyclopedias, and
Scientific American,"
Metcalfe says. "Even though in our experiments answers were delivered
by a computer, those answers were written by people. So it makes total
sense that accepting corrections involves your relationship with other
people." Medial frontal gyrus activation patterns mirrored those of the
anterior cingulate.
In addition, after people were told that an answer in which they were
very confident was wrong, the fMRI showed activation in the right
temporoparietal junction, an area linked with thinking about what others
might know, and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region
linked with the avoidance of thinking about something. The former
suggests that subjects recognized that others had different beliefs than
them, wh ereas the latter hints they may have been suppressing their
wrong answers
after learning they were incorrect, Metcalfe says. The scientists
detailed their findings online March 27 in the
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
The findings have implications for educational techniques and theory.
"The broadest conclusion we might draw from these findings is that we
may have the wrong attitude toward errors," says cognitive psychologist
Robert Bjork at University of California, Los Angeles, who did not take
part in this work. "Throughout society and our educational system, there
tends to be an attitude that you don't want people making errors and
mistakes during learning. These findings and related findings suggest
that in order to increase the effectiveness of long-term learning and
understanding, we should structure instruction and training so that
likely errors and misconceptions will come up during the learning
process, and use them as opportunities for learning."
He added, "when it comes to, say, job contexts such as
nuclear power plants
or the military or the police...we don't really want such errors to be
deferred until a time and place where they may really matter, and matter
greatly."
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