And not that much from failures

Aug 5, 2009 07:49 GMT  ·  By

A new study from experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Picower Institute for Learning and Memory shows that we may have more to learn from our successes than from our failures. The new research, conducted on monkeys, revealed that neurons in the brain involved in learning became a lot more fine-tuned after a success than after a mishap. The scientists infer that this type of associations is a tool of evolution, which ultimately leads to an improvement in behavior.

In the experiments, monkeys were trained to look right or left, depending on what type of images they saw on a computer screen. Whenever they got the “answer” right, they were rewarded. The science team says that this led to a much higher improvement in success rates, than if they were to be punished for not looking in the correct direction.

The monkeys learned how to respond to the images – which flashed for a few seconds – by trial and error, the experts say. The team was led by researcher Earl K. Miller, LiveScience reports.

The neurons that the experts focused on were located in the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia, as they have been associated with playing an important role in learning in previous studies. Miller says that they indeed “keep track of recent successes and failures.” Oddly enough, the nerve cells were more responsive to correct answers, in that they fired with much more accuracy in case of a correct answer than an incorrect one. This also suggests that they “learn” faster than the monkey itself does.

“The neurons in these areas improve their tuning, they learn better when the animal had a recent success, versus when the animal had a failure. When the animal had a failure, there was virtually no change in neural processing, the neurons didn’t improve at all,” Miller adds. The investigations also revealed that the learning-associated neural signals in the monkeys' brain lasted for several seconds. “By careful examination of this neural activity, we [found] the signal does in fact linger, it lingers on for multiple seconds, long enough to be the bridge between the feedback the animal got from the environment and the very next learning episode,” the expert shares.

“In our study, the situation was a reward versus no reward, success versus the absence of success, but there’s some cases where mistakes can actually lead to very bad negative consequences, like a loss of money, or loss of a scholarship. When the failure actually leads to a negative consequence rather than just the absence of a positive, that might engage learning mechanisms that rely on feedback from that negative consequence, so maybe it’s a different situation,” Miller concludes.