Different Electrophysiological Responses to Informative Value of Feedback Between Children and Adults

Abstract

The ability to learn from feedback is important for children’s adaptive behavior and school learning. Feedback has two main components, informative value and valence. How to disentangle these two components and what is the developmental neural correlates of using the informative value of feedback is still an open question. In this study, 23 children (7–10 years old) and 19 adults (19–22 years old) were asked to perform a rule induction task, in which they were required to find a rule, based on the informative value of feedback. Behavioral results indicated that the likelihood of correct searching behavior under negative feedback was low for children. Event-related potentials showed that (1) the effect of valence was processed in a wide time window, particularly in the N2 component; (2) the encoding process of the informative value of negative feedback began later for children than for adults; (3) a clear P300 was observed for adults; for children, however, P300 was absent in the frontal region; and (4) children processed the informative value of feedback chiefly in the left sites during the P300 time window, whereas adults did not show this laterality. These results suggested that children were less sensitive to the informative value of negative feedback possibly because of the immature brain.

The Index Predicting Power and Feedback Processing Characteristics in the WCST

“…The error feedback information might not be fully integrated and utilized to guide their choice. Just as mentioned in former researches, informative value and valence value were both included in feedback [11,[26][27]. Participants who failed to extract the information value of feedback would receive a lower score in the rule learning task [27].…”

Development of associations between elementary school students’ mindsets and attentional neural processing of feedback in an arithmetic task

“…Furthermore, the size of the outcome (either loss or reward) has been associated with the feedback-related P300 amplitude, with outcomes of a greater magnitude relating to a larger P300 than that elicited by smaller outcomes ( San Martín, 2012 ). Nonetheless, the findings on the effect of feedback or outcome valence on P300 have been somewhat inconsistent, with some studies reporting feedback-related P300 to be greater in the case of positive feedback (adults: Wu and Zhou, 2009 ; Ernst and Steinhauser, 2012 ), others finding a larger P300 for negative feedback (children: Arbel, 2020 ; adults: Butterfield and Mangels, 2003 ), and some showing it to be insensitive to the valence of the feedback stimulus (children: Ferdinand et al, 2016 ; Du et al, 2018 ; adults: Hajcak et al, 2005 ; Yeung et al, 2005 ; for a review, see San Martín, 2012 ). Furthermore, the findings of Buritica et al (2018) indicate that, in children, differences between the positive- and negative-feedback P300 depend on the task design.…”