The More We Know, the More We Can Learn

Our ability to process and reason is important in learning, but as we get older, the knowledge and skills we acquire through experience and education become our best teachers. The more we know, in other words, the more easily we acquire new knowledge.

Margaret Beier

Quickly grasping and remembering new information becomes more difficult as we age because our ability to process and reason begins to decline around age 20. But a new study by Rice psychologist Margaret Beier shows that acquiring new knowledge and learning new skills depends not just on how smart we are, but also on what we already have learned and experienced throughout our lives.

“Knowledge acquired through education and experience isn’t just an index of what a person knows,” says Beier. “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. But, as Beier found, narrowly defining intelligence in this way may discount a large portion of what adults know and underestimate what they can learn. “We’re finding,” she says, “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’s findings have implications not only for defining a person’s cognitive abilities at different stages of life and predicting how well that person might perform in certain environments, but also for training and educating older learners as well.

In their study “Age, Ability, and the Role of Prior Knowledge on the Acquisition of New Domain Knowledge,” published in Psychology and Aging, Beier and Georgia Institute of Technology psychologist Phillip Ackerman examine 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 time-constraint 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 were taken to identify the participants’ cognitive ability, general knowledge, and experience by way of spatial, numerical, and verbal tests as well as by cultural comprehension exams, vocabulary, and reading tests.

Eventually, Beier hopes to 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,” Beier concludes, “we need to have a better understanding of the types of interventions needed for older learners.”

In other research related to human intelligence, Beier has worked closely with Ackerman on a number of projects examining the relationship between working memory ability and intelligence. One of those studies challenges the claim of a number of cognitive psychologists that working memory is the same as intelligence.

—B. J. Almond