That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Negative Feedback

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

It's becoming increasingly common in some professional settings to avoid giving negative feedback. In today's neuroscience bite, we discuss how negative feedback is actually important for helping us learn. 

My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria and in my spare time I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another neuroscience bite. So this bite stems from an argument I was having with someone recently. I won't go into who that is because that would be inappropriate but basically the argument was along the lines that within our educational systems, it's become almost seen as wrong to give negative feedback. And there's a big difference between negative feedback and negativity. And the idea that's becoming more prevalent is we should only give positive feedback. But from a neuroscience perspective, this is wrong, and it's wrong for two reasons. First of all, if you remember when we

talked about learning from feedback or reinforcement learning, we talked about the idea of prediction errors. We learn when our expectations are different from outcomes. So if we think something went well and then we find out it didn't, that is a negative prediction error. And negative prediction errors drive learning as well. They help us avoid things we don't want to repeat. And we see this. If you measure dopamine responses, which is one way to study learning in the brain, and dopamine is the neurotransmitter that underlies this kind of learning, we see that they do encode negative prediction errors. If you look at the human electroencephalogram or EEG, we see that people process negative feedback and there's negative prediction errors. We see this with fMRI. So our brains are encoding negative prediction

errors and we do learn from them. So there is a place for negative feedback in our learning environments. And it gets even deeper than that. Dopamine, as I mentioned, underlies this type of feedback driven learning. And at the actual neuronal level, there's different types of dopamine receptors, D1 and D2 receptors. And work by a colleague of mine, Michael Frank, examined this issue and basically found that D1 receptors seem to be more sensitive to reward and positive feedback, whereas D2 receptors seem to be more aligned with negative feedback and negative prediction errors. So we have a hardwired system that learns equally from negative feedback just as much as it learns from positive feedback.

Where this goes even a bit deeper is different people have different proportions of these receptors. So there literally are people out there with more D2 receptors, which suggests, and this is a suggest still, that these people would learn more from negative feedback than positive feedback. So this trend that's going through our educational system to avoid negative feedback, from a neuroscience perspective, it's wrong. That's our bite today. Remember, check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com, links to our Etsy store, links to Patreon. As ever, thank you to the people that support us on Patreon. All the money goes to graduate students in the Craig Olson Lab.

If you've got ideas, at thatneuroscienceguy on Twitter. And of course, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and please subscribe. My name's Olof Craig Olson, and this has been another Neuroscience Bite.