Verbal feedback and the feature-positive effect in children

Abstract

A pair of displays having common elements may be differentiated by the presence of a distinctive feature in one of the displays. When required to discriminate between such displays presented simultaneously, young children more readily learn to confine their responses to the display containing the distinctive feature (feature-positive condition) than to the display which does not contain the distinctive feature (feature-negative condition). The effect of explicit verbal feedback for incorrect choices on the learning of discriminations of this type was examined in 3- to 5-year-old children. In the feature-positive case, explicit feedback for incorrect responses increased the tendency to respond directly to the distinctive feature when responding on the positive display and greatly reduced errors. In the feature-negative case, explicit feedback for incorrect responses increased the tendency to avoid the distinctive feature in favor of a common feature when responding on the negative display. In this case, however, consistent avoidance of the distinctive feature on the negative display was not always followed by the development of consistent choice of the positive display, and errors continued to occur at a high rate throughout training for most subjects. These results reflect the difference in the structure of the feature-positive and feature-negative tasks.