Oops – That was a Mistake! How Toddler Brains React to Feedback

Oops, I just clicked on the wrong button on my computer (mistake) and it made this error sound that you might know. This is an example of feedback. Feedback is useful information to indicate if something was correct or wrong and we can use feedback to improve something. For example, I do not want to make the same mistake again, so now, I click on the right button! This is called feedback learning. You often get feedback on what you are doing and sometimes that feedback tells your brain “Oops, that was a mistake!” From such feedback, you can learn and do things better the next time. Learning from feedback is, especially, important early in life when young children still need to learn a lot about the world. Interestingly, the brain regions that generate the feedback signal, however, take a long time to fully develop. Sometimes, they do not completely develop even until the late teenage years. How then do young children (also called toddlers) between the ages of one and three process the feedback signal in their brain? And how do they learn based on the feedback they get? These were some of the questions that we wanted to answer. RevIewed by: