False feedback and beliefs influence name recall in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT

Feedback is an important self-regulatory process that affects task effort and subsequent performance. Benefits of positive feedback for list recall have been explored in research on goals and feedback, but the effect of negative feedback on memory has rarely been studied. The current research extends knowledge of memory and feedback effects by investigating face–name association memory and by examining the potential mediation of feedback effects, in younger and older adults, through self-evaluative beliefs. Beliefs were assessed before and after name recognition and name recall testing. Repeated presentation of false positive feedback was compared to false negative feedback and a no feedback condition. Results showed that memory self-efficacy declined over time for participants in the negative and no feedback conditions but was sustained for those receiving positive feedback. Furthermore, participants who received negative feedback felt older after testing than before testing. For name recall, the positive feedback group outperformed the negative feedback and no feedback groups combined, with no age interactions. The observed feedback-related effects on memory were fully mediated by changes in memory self-efficacy. These findings advance our understanding of how beliefs are related to feedback in memory and inform future studies examining the importance of self-regulation in memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Face–name association
• feedback
• memory self-efficacy
• subjective age
• self-regulation

Acknowledgements

We thank Lindsay Patenaude for her assistance in training and supervising research assistants and thank our research assistants for their devoted efforts throughout the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Carla M. Strickland-Hughes http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8446-8708

Notes

1 In this paper, the focus is on overall task performance feedback, that is, an assessment of overall scores (good or poor performance, high or low performance), not item-by-item accuracy feedback. Throughout the paper, the term feedback will refer to an overall judgment about performance, made by an individual or an observer/experimenter.

2 We thank the reviewers for the suggestion to test whether high performers reacted differently to the feedback than low performers, in terms of changes in self-efficacy after feedback. We divided the overall sample into three “performance level” groups (best, middle, and worst performers). Performance differences were significant between these three groups, but they did not interact with feedback condition to predict memory self-efficacy. The results clearly showed a very steep decline in self-efficacy for all three performance level groups in the negative condition, with more modest change in all groups in the other two conditions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Psychology at University of Florida. While working on this manuscript, NCE was partially supported by the Center for Cognitive Aging and Memory and the NIH-funded Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center [P30AG028740] at University of Florida.