Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults.

Eight-year-olds respond better to positive feedback (‘Well done!’) than negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’) whereas twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

Developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered this difference using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and barely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their strategic “control centers” in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

Crone explains, “From the literature, it appears that young children respond better to reward than to punishment.” She can also imagine how this comes about: “The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible.”

So is this the result of a maturing brain or experience. Nobody knows yet. “This kind of brain research has only been possible for the last ten years or so,’ says Crone, ‘and there are a lot more questions which have to be answered. But it is probably a combination of the brain maturing and experience.”

There is also an area of the brain that responds strongly to positive feedback in both children and adults: the basal ganglia, just outside the cerebral cortex. The activity of this area of the brain does not change over time. It remains active in all age groups. So it seems positive feedback may be better than criticism or negative feedback regardless of age.

Evaluating the Negative or Valuing the Positive? Neural Mechanisms Supporting Feedback-Based Learning across Development
Anna C. K. van Duijvenvoorde, Kiki Zanolie, Serge A. R. B. Rombouts, Maartje E. J. Raijmakers, and Eveline A. Crone
The Journal of Neuroscience, 17 September 2008