Learning of a serial task by different age groups

In a serial learning task given to subjects whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy, a decline in performance showed itself as a loss of speed in the thirties, a loss of accuracy in the forties, and a marked loss of both speed and accuracy in the fifties and sixties. Experiments on recall and reorganization of material verified that older subjects were forgetting more quickly than younger, but that one of their main difficulties was an inability to substitute new reponses in an already mentally formed sequence.

Older subjects were not introducing new learning features but accentuating normal tendencies, such as the repetition of the same error at the same serial position. In so far as subjects learned their repeated errors, final learning involved unlearning, with the often observable phenomenon of the previously learned error serving as the cue for the more recently learned correct response. In terms of schematic concepts of mental functions, serial learning difficulty was not so much the formation of a general “scheme” but its subsequent amendment. Preformed habits influenced both the learning procedure and its results, particularly in the constraints and expectancies which the making of one serial response had upon another.