The Feedback-Related Negativity Is Modulated by the Online / Offline Presence of a Feedback Source in probabilistic learning task
Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
Nowadays we are rapidly shifting from face-to-face to online communication and education. It is evident that the ways of receiving and processing information (including feedback) in online and offline formats differ, but this difference has not yet been thoroughly studied and described from the perspective of psychophysiology. The objective of this study was to compare offline and online educational interaction in terms of electrophysiological markers of feedback processing. We modeled an elementary educational process as solving a series of problems by students receiving the feedback (positive or negative) from an instructor to examine the hypothesis that the feedback participants receive from an online instructor will elicit smaller event-related potential (ERP) components (the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300) compared to offline presence of the instructor. We also took into account the factor of the feedback source attribution whether the participants considered it to be an instructor or a computer program. Though the P300 amplitude was modulated by the feedback valence only, FRN amplitudes were enhanced in the participants who regarded feedback as delivered by more socially relevant source (human vs computer) regardless of the valence of the feedback. Our study is the first to demonstrate that offline and online learning formats differ in terms of the neurophysiological correlates of the feedback processing. Contrary to our hypothesis, in online condition we observed more pronounced difference between the FRN for rewarded and non-rewarded trials, which suggests that the reward prediction error signal is increased in online condition.