Make Them Learn: With Carrot or Stick?

Feedback is essential for learning. Not only does the feedback need to ensure that learning was achieved (as in testing), but feedback also needs to reinforce the motivation to learn. The age-old questions arises: do we use the carrot or the stick? Which works best, negative or positive reinforcement? Most people have an opinion, but now we have scientific studies of the question. And the answer is, it depends.

For example, three studies showed that adults correct their behavior better in response to negative feedback rather than positive feedback, whereas 8- to 11-year old children respond just the opposite. A follow-up study by Anna van Duijvenvoorde and colleagues in the Netherlands used MRI scans to examine how the brain changes with age and how that relates to feedback-based learning. The subjects were divided into three age groups, 8-9, 11-13, and 18-25. Each subject performed the same learning task and were given positive and negative feedback to improve their performance. After each trial, subjects were shown on a screen an “X” or a “+” to tell them they were wrong or right.

Regardless of the nature of the feedback, young adults learned bdetter than the children. For all three age groups, learning was more effective with positive feedback. Moreover, the decreased learning from negative feedback was conspicuously greater in the youngest age group, while in the young adults, the effect of feedback type was negligible.

Not surprisingly, there were brain scan indicators of differing response to type of feedback. With age, both types of feedback produced a shift toward recruiting more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This part of the cortex was more active after negative feed back in adults but after positive feedback in the 8-9 year-old children. The prefrontal cortex activity was about the same for negative and positive feedback in the 11-13 year olds, suggesting that this is a transition stage in development of learning style and capability.

Take home message? Positive feedback usually works best in young children (that is, after all, how they train seals). Negative feedback works just about as well as positive feedback in young adults. One more point: with the exception of language acquisition, young children are not the superior learners that many people believe.

Source: van Duijvenvoorde, A. C. K. 2008. Evaluating the negative or valuing the positive? Neural mechanisms supporting feedback-based learning across development. J. Neuroscience. 28 (38) 9495-9503.