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How You Learn More from Success Than Failure

Scientific American - Posted: November 4th, 2009, 9:00am EST

pHave you ever bowled a string of strikes that seems like it came out of nowhere? There might be more to such streaks than pure luck, according to a study that offers new clues as to how the brain learns from positive and negative experiences./ppTraining monkeys on a two-choice visual task, researchers found that the animalsrsquo; brains kept track of recent successes and failures. A correct answer had impressive effects: it improved neural processing and sent the monkeysrsquo; performance soaring in the next trial. But if a monkey made a mistake in one trial, even after mastering the task, it performed around chance level in the next trial--in other words, it was thrown off by mistakes instead of learning from them./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-success-breeds-success[More]/a

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