We all make mistakes. No, really. When we calculate something, write an email, or have a conversation with someone. You might think you know the right answer, only to find out you were wrong after all. But what actually happens after we make a mistake? And does that change as we get older and perhaps wiser?

In a new study by Eveline Jacobs and colleagues from KU Leuven and the University of Graz, the researchers investigated exactly that. More than 400 participants, ranging from 7-year-olds to adults, were presented with arithmetic tasks in which the researchers looked not only at the correct answers but also at how people reacted when they made mistakes.

A well-known phenomenon in cognitive psychology is post-error slowing. Loosely translated: after a mistake, people often work a little slower. That seems logical. You make a mistake, realise something went wrong, and become more cautious. The researchers found that this effect occurred at all ages. Both children and adults slow down after making a mistake. However, there was a striking difference in the magnitude of that effect. The youngest children did so the most. As age increased, that slowdown diminished and stabilised from adolescence onwards.

That might seem as if older students learn less from mistakes, but the opposite is likely true. The authors suspect that young children work primarily reactively. They make a mistake and react to it. Older children and adults seem to use proactive strategies more often. They wait less for a mistake to occur and try to prevent problems in advance.

It became even more interesting when the researchers looked at performance. Among 7- and 8-year-olds, that delay after errors was associated with better results. Children who took more time after making a mistake generally performed better. Among older students and adults, that association largely disappeared.

This suggests that slowing down after a mistake is a particularly useful strategy at a young age. For older learners, it seems to be less important. They may have other ways of regulating their thinking.

The researchers also looked at another question: how well participants could estimate whether their answers were correct. We call this metacognitive monitoring. In other words, do you know when you know something, and do you know when you are unsure? This turned out to correlate much more consistently with performance. Across virtually all age groups, participants performed better when they could more accurately estimate whether their answer was correct. That result aligns nicely with previous research. Successful learners are often not only those who know a lot, but also those who can reasonably well assess what they know and what they have not yet mastered.

Does this mean that teachers must teach children to work more slowly after every mistake? No. The research does not go far enough for that. It primarily shows that young children who briefly slow down after making mistakes generally perform better. The most important practical insight likely lies elsewhere.

Mistakes are not simply failures. They yield information. What distinguishes good students is not that they never make mistakes, but that they do something with them. With young children, this sometimes literally means slowing down for a moment. With older students, it seems more about anticipating when extra attention is needed.

That does not make this study a revolutionary breakthrough. But it does offer an interesting insight into how the relationship between errors, self-regulation, and learning changes as we get older. Learning from mistakes, therefore, is not a single skill. It is something that evolves as you grow up.