Effects of posttransfer feedback informativeness in a transitive inference task

Transitive inference (TI), referring to one's ability to learn that if A > B and B > C, one can infer that A > C, is a form of serial learning that has been tested using a variety of experimental protocols. An element of most of these protocols is the presentation of some form of visual corrective feedback to help inform naïve participants about the nature of the task. Therefore, corrective feedback is often used as a critical tool for experimental TI. To further explore this tool, we presented varying forms/presence of visual feedback during TI performance: corrective, none, and ambiguous. Of the three conditions, presentation of the ambiguous feedback yielded the clearest disruption of TI performance, obvious in measurements of both response accuracy and reaction times. Participants appears to remain engaged with feedback was withheld entirely, but to disengage when presented with ambiguous feedback. Therefore, the choice regarding the form of feedback provided during testing may be critical for information processing of inferences.