The Impact of Punishment and Reward Feedback on Sequence Learning

Abstract

Next to practice itself, feedback provided to a learner from an external source such as a coach or therapist is considered the most important factor facilitating skill acquisition. Past research has suggested that punishment and reward feedback have dissociable effects on learning and retention, respectively. However, other studies have suggested a more reliable effect of punishment feedback while failing to replicate the benefit of reward on retention. This discrepancy across experiments may be the result of seemingly innocuous methodological differences. Here, I ran a pre-registered online experiment to test the replicability of the supposed dissociable effects of punishment and reward on learning during training and retention, respectively. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either punishment feedback (n = 34) or reward feedback (n = 34) during the training period as they learned a repeating 12-element sequence in a serial reaction time task. Feedback consisted of participants either seeing a red (Punishment group) or green (Reward group) box flash on their computer screen and, unbeknownst to them, either a corresponding loss (Punishment group) or gain (Reward group) of points from their starting total. Participants were informed that a good final point score (i.e., the higher the better) could earn them extra entries into a gift card lottery. Contrary to what much of the literature has found, our results revealed no statistically significant differences between groups in either the training or retention phases of the experiment. In conclusion, the findings of this experiment failed to replicate the previously found dissociable effects of punishment and reward feedback on learning and retention, respectively. The data instead suggests that providing participants with punishment or reward feedback may affect learning and retention in a similar manner.