Confirmatory Feedback Research Articles

Eyewitnesses under influence: How feedback affects the realism in confidence judgements

This study investigated the effect of two types of feedback (confirmatory and disconfirmatory) on the accuracy in witnesses’ confidence judgements of their event memory. Overall, the witnesses evidenced overconfidence both when they received feedback and in the Control condition (no feedback). The results showed that confirmatory feedback caused higher overconfidence, compared both with when receiving disconfirmatory and no feedback. These results suggest that the impact of feedback on the accuracy of confidence judgements show the same pattern of results for event memory as for line-up identification tasks. Finally, when the witnesses rated the total number of questions that they had answered correctly they gave fairly correct estimates compared with their actual number of correct answers.

The effects of source and type of feedback on child witnesses' metamemory accuracy

AbstractThis study investigated the effect of feedback on the accuracy (realism) of 12‐year‐old children's metacognitive judgments of their answers to questions about a film clip. Two types of judgments were investigated: confidence judgments (on each question) and frequency judgments (i.e. estimates of overall accuracy). The source of feedback, whether it was presented as provided by a teacher or a peer child, did not influence metacognitive accuracy. Four types of feedback were given depending on whether the participant's answer was correct and depending on whether the feedback confirmed or disconfirmed the child's answer. The children showed large overconfidence when they received confirmatory feedback but much less so when they received disconfirmatory feedback. The children gave frequency judgments implying that they had more correct answers than they actually had. No main gender differences were found for any of the measures. The results indicate a high degree of malleability in children's metacognitive judgments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Increasing False Recognition Rates with Confirmatory Feedback: A Phenomenological Analysis

During a simulated witness interrogation, participants were encouraged to confabulate an account consistent with false information concerning a videotaped event. The interviewer verbally affirmed some false responses. Previous research has shown that, a week later, participants often recognize confabulated events that were affirmed by the experimenter as being from the video. What is unclear is whether confirmatory feedback encouraged a change in the mental representation of the confabulated events to fit the original event or confirmation might have merely encouraged a change in beliefs about the event. To further understand the mechanisms that underlie the confirmatory feedback effect, participants were asked to judge the phenomenological experience associated with false recognition.

Interviewing witnesses: forced confabulation and confirmatory feedback increase false memories.

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, ______ is the correct answer") and provided neutral (uninformative) feedback for the remaining confabulated responses (e.g., "O.K_____". One week later participants developed false memories for the events they had earlier confabulated knowingly. However confirmatory feedback increased false memory for forcibly confabulated events, increased confidence in those false memories, and increased the likelihood that participants wouldfreely report the confabulated events 1 to 2 months later The results illustrate the powerful role of social-motivational factors in promoting the development offalse memories.

Tutoring: Guided Learning by Doing

Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes. In this article, we seek to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these actions should be pedagogically useful. This experiment examined university students learning LISP programming with the assistance of a tutor. Tutoring sessions were audiotaped, allowing u to analyze every verbal utterance during the sessions and thereby to identify the conversational events that lead to pedagogical success. This discourse analysis suggests that tutors are successful because they take a very active role in leading the problem solving by offering confirmatory feedback and additional guidance while students are on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. However, tutors carefully structure their feedback to allow students to perform as much of the work as possible while the tutor ensures that problem solving stays on track. These results suggest the types of strate...

Confirmatory and disconfirmatory feedback in the communication between parents of schizophrenics, pathological controls and normal offspring

Confirmatory and disconfirmatory feedback in the communication between parents of schizophrenics, pathological controls and normal offspring