Attentional Allocation During Feedback: Eyetracking Adventures on the Other Side of the Response

Attentional Allocation During Feedback: Eyetracking Adventures on the Other Side of the Response Marcus R. Watson (marcusw@sfu.ca) Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University - 8888 University Drive Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6. Canada Mark R. Blair (mblair@sfu.ca) Cognitive Science Program & Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University - 8888 University Drive Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6. Canada Abstract feedback that pertains to aspects of the movement itself (Wulf et al., 2002). Furthermore, it seems that giving sparse feedback every few trials is more effective than giving feedback every trial. Wulf et al. suggest that this is because overuse of external feedback causes subjects to become dependent on it and to ignore the internal feedback from their own body. In many paradigms, however, internal feedback is not particularly useful, at least not initially, because participants have no idea what constitutes satisfactory performance. In these situations, external feedback on the accuracy of responses is often crucial to learning. There have been a number of neurophysiological studies on the role of feedback in such cases, which typically focus on where and how error signals influence neural connectivity. One important recent finding is that neural components associated with feedback may be coding differences between outcomes and expectations, rather than errors per se (Holroyd & Krigolson, 2007; Oliveira, McDonald, & Goodman, 2007). Studies also include efforts to localize error processing to specific brain regions for specific tasks (e.g., Seger, 2007) . Error signals and violations of expectancy are clearly important, but there are other aspects to feedback. On information integration categorization tasks, for example, learning is hampered when feedback is not given on correct trials (Ashby & O’Brien, 2007). Positive reinforcement, then, can also be an important part of learning. Another source of information during feedback is the stimulus itself. In many real-life situations and experimental paradigms stimuli are visible during feedback, and evidence shows that participants are doing something with the stimuli during this time. Bourne, Guy, Dodd and Justesen (1965) showed that participants in a categorization task who were shown stimuli during feedback made fewer errors than participants who were not. Furthermore, when the length of the feedback phase was increased to 29 seconds (! ) those participants who were shown the stimulus during this time continued to improve their performance, whereas the performance of other participants was actually impaired. Bourne et al. suggest that these effects are due to participants forgetting fewer aspects of a stimulus if it remains in view during feedback, which prevents them from accidentally forming hypotheses that are incompatible with this stimulus. We used an eye-tracker to investigate the allocation of overt attention during feedback on a categorization task. Results suggest several conclusions: (1) Participants spend a significant amount of time attending to stimuli re-presented during feedback, indicating that this re-presentation may play an important role in learning. (2) Participants spend more time attending to the stimulus during feedback on incorrect trials than on correct trials, indicating that incorrect trials may be more important than correct ones. (3) Attentional allocation to the re-presented stimulus during incorrect trials is predictive of subjects’ ability to learn the task, even as few as ten trials into the experiment. This study shows that eyetracking studies of feedback are a promising new method of investigating learning processes. Keywords: feedback; error processing; learning; categorization; eye-tracking Introduction When learning new skills it often helps to be told what you are doing right and wrong. Some kinds of learning are simply impossible without feedback (e.g., Ashby & O’Brien, 2007), and in other cases unsupervised learning can be slower and less successful than learning with feedback (Wulf, McConnel, Gartner & Schwarz, 2002). Understanding how and why feedback works, then, is crucial if we want to understand learning in general. This goal has broad importance for educational theory, and also for the development of efficient experimental paradigms where more participants learn the assigned task. Feedback has been studied in the context of sports and motor skill learning (e.g., Wulf et al., 2002), human resource management (e.g., Herold & Fedor, 2003), educational instruction (e.g., Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik, & Morgan, 1991), language learning (e.g., Pashler, Cepeda, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2005), categorization (e.g., Ashby et al., 2002), and neuroscience (e.g., Holroyd & Krigolson, 2007; Seger, in press). A number of studies have compared the effectiveness of different kinds of feedback. Because of the wide variety of learning situations being investigated in these studies it is not clear that their conclusions apply across the board, but it is nevertheless worth briefly considering some results. In motor learning, feedback that draws attention to the external results of a movement is more beneficial than