Cognitive decline?: Pah!

• Autores: Michael Ramscar, R. Harald Baayen
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2961, 2014, págs. 28-29
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ramscar and Baayen explain why paired associate learning tests paint a misleading picture of older people's cognitive abilities. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is famous for conditioning dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. This led to a view of learning called associationism; if a cue is present, and an outcome follows, animals learn to associate them. Although humans can learn this way, the word associate" is misleading. People's brains actually learn by making and testing predictions about the world. These are used to determine cues that are unreliable, which the brains then ignore and hence eliminate. It turns out that a dog associates a bell with food only because it has learned to ignore all other cues available to it.