Study finds grasping new information becomes more difficult with age

Study finds grasping new information becomes more difficult with age

BY PAM SHERIDAN
Special to the Rice News

Quickly grasping and remembering new information becomes more difficult with age. While the ability to process and reason begins to decline around age 20, a new Rice University study found that acquiring new knowledge and learning new skills depends not just on a person’s smarts, but on previous knowledge and experience obtained throughout life.

“Knowledge acquired through education and experience isn’t just an index of what a person knows,” said Margaret Beier, assistant professor of psychology. “It’s also an indication of how successful an individual is at acquiring knowledge.”

Most prior studies have equated intelligence with working memory — the ability to keep something in memory while performing other tasks — or with how well a person performs abstract nonverbal reasoning tasks. Beier found that narrowly defining intelligence in this way may discount a large portion of what adults know and underestimate what they can learn.

“We’re finding that what middle-aged or older adults lack in working memory or in the ability to quickly process information is supplemented by the prior knowledge and experience they’ve had in their lives,” Beier said.

Beier’s findings have implications not only for defining a person’s cognitive abilities at different stages of their lives and predicting how well they might perform in certain environments, but for training and educating older learners as well.

In a study in the journal Psychology and Aging titled “Age, Ability and the Role of Prior Knowledge on the Acquisition of New Domain Knowledge,” Beier and Phillip Ackerman from Georgia Institute of Technology examined how adults acquire knowledge in a learning environment that takes into account individual differences in prior knowledge, intellectual abilities and age.

To replicate real-world training programs, the researchers designed both structured and unstructured learning modules covering two topics: health and technology. One module was a timed video presented in the laboratory, and the other was a homework packet given to the participants to study on their own.

The video learning experience was predicted to require focused attention and such cognitive abilities as working memory, while the homework learning module mimicked a more typical learning experience, permitting the participants time to review the material at their leisure over three days. Data was collected on 199 participants, including their age, gender, level of education and an assessment of their prior knowledge and experience related to the two topics. A broad range of measures was taken to identify the participants’ cognitive ability and general knowledge and experience by way of spatial, numerical and verbal tests, as well as cultural comprehension exams and vocabulary and reading tests.

Beier said she hopes to eventually conduct research in a number of organizations with managers who are training workers between the ages of 30 and 65.

“Because our intellectual abilities change as we get older, we need to have a better understanding of the types of interventions needed for older learners,” Beier said.