They just may not remember them so well the next day.
This Back Pager is hurtling towards a big number, birthday-wise, and is firmly in the territory of “this whole growing-up business is great fun and all but don’t you think that’s enough?”
We haven’t yet started requiring the office Zoomers to set up our tech, though they did have to explain Brat to us.
It’s a relief that this study on motor skill acquisition and retention over the life course doesn’t trouble itself with our age bracket. We don’t really want to know.
The team set out to test the popular wisdom that prepubescent children learn motor skills faster than older teens and adults, taking into account both “online” and “offline” learning, i.e. during actual practice and during sleep when memories consolidate.
They note two types of online learning that operate in parallel: implicit, accomplished with little conscious awareness, and explicit, involving strategic, higher-order cognitive processes. Explicit learning produces “rapid improvements that are labile and easily forgotten. In contrast, for implicit learning, improvements are slower, but they show stronger retention.”
Previous studies testing whether this translates into easy-come-easy-go results for adults and more slow-and-steady attainment for children have been mixed, the authors say.
They took 132 subjects across four age groups – eight to 10, 12 to 14, 16 to 18 and 20 to 30 – and taught them “a computer-based visuo-motor accuracy tracking task (VATT) that required them to accurately control pinch force applied to a spring-loaded lever to track series of target boxes”. They made the task harder for adults to reflect their greater dexterity.
After a baseline performance test they trained in eight blocks separated by rest. Their retention was tested after a 10-minute break and after 24 hours, with changes from baseline taken to reflect online and offline learning respectively.
Their spatial working memory was tested and they kept a sleep diary.
Overall learning was the same across groups.
Online (in-session) learning was weakest in the youngest group, but the children gained in performance overnight, improving their skills without practice, while the adults’ performance worsened. These offline changes in performance were significantly greater in children and young teens than in older teens and adults.
“Adult-like learning was characterised by rapid and large online performance gains that were susceptible to forgetting and led to decay in performance over time,” the authors write. “On the other hand, learning in children was characterised by slower and smaller performance gains during practice that were robust against forgetting over time and eventually led to offline gains in performance with sleep.”
The authors, who are interested in the role of development and the different mechanisms that guide learning at different stages, do not mention the role of motivation. We wonder whether in the real world an adult’s desire to, say, learn an instrument for their own satisfaction, rather than being schlepped to lessons and forced to practise music that bores them, might be a significant extra factor.
When the Back Page hit the despised piano again in young adulthood after years’ break, knowing at last what we actually wanted to play, we achieved more in a very short time than in many agonising years of childhood lessons.
In fairness, this study’s choice of the spring-loaded lever and target boxes sounds both so boring and so impractical that there can have been no motivation at any age group to excel at it.
Send teachable story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
