| Abstract | The present research investigated what type of feedback was most beneficial to category learning. The discriminative contrast hypothesis suggests that comparisons between categories enhances learning (e.g., Kornell & Bjork, 2008). As such, feedback that gave learners additional information and encouraged between-category comparisons with additional information (i.e., contrast feedback) was predicted to improve category learning more than feedback that only gave additional information (i.e., feature feedback), feedback that gave the correct answer (i.e., corrective feedback) or no feedback. To explore this, participants learned categories of organic chemistry compounds and received different types of feedback. The results revealed that providing feedback during category learning was beneficial for learning, and that providing additional information during feedback was beneficial to later performance above and beyond corrective feedback. The contrast feedback group did not perform better than did the feature feedback group; more research should investigate the degree to which contrast feedback improves later performance. |
