Learning - success, failure, & the bigger the carrot..

Researchers Earl K. Miller, Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have shown (press release 29 July 2009) that, at least in monkeys:

"Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail."

Maybe that's why people tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, and never learn from their mistakes. (The title of their article isn't given in the news release - see that for more info.)

And separately, on the carrot and stick front, while it's known that being rewarded for something makes you learn it faster (aka effect on "higher cognitive processes"), it's been found that the "reward effect" can be strengthened by adding dopaminergic compounds to boost the "teaching signal".

While targeted use of such compounds might help patients e.g. re-learn things after a stroke, they warned that use should be with care - higher brain dopamine level is said to be the cause of [associated with?] mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

That study also showed that the bigger the reward on offer, the faster people learned to make the correct decision i.e. the reward effect also influences "somatosensory processes" - the carrot effect turns out to be stronger the higher the reward.

Pleger B, Ruff CC, Blankenburg F, Klöppel S, Driver J, et al. (2009) Influence of Dopaminergically Mediated Reward on Somatosensory Decision-Making. Press release 27 July 2009.