The Role of Response Confidence in Feedback Uptake in Child and Adult Participants

<p dir="ltr">This study examined how confidence influences the effectiveness of feedback. Experiment 1 used adult participants. Experiments 2A and 2B used children between 4 and 8. Each participant completed a matrix task and rated their confidence after each trial. There were three conditions, no feedback, some feedback, and elaborative feedback. Accuracy, confidence level, and reaction time were measured to observe the effects of various degrees of feedback on accuracy and confidence. We also aimed to test if any of these groups would show the hypercorrection effect-an effect where people are more likely to correct high confidence errors compared to low confidence errors-while completing this task. Experiment 1 showed that feedback was valuable to learning on this task, however no hypercorrection was observed. Experiments 2A and 2B showed significant learning in the children as well as an ability to somewhat reliably gauge their own confidence.</p>