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How Motivation Impacts Teenagers' Learning

Zhuang Y, Feng W, Liao Y · Frontiers in psychology · 2017

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Highly motivated adolescents struggle to learn from their mistakes when high rewards or punishments are on the line.

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Key findings

Across all age groups, learning from positive feedback resulted in higher accuracy than negative feedback. However, in the high-motivation gambling task, early adolescents showed a 11.5% gap in learning accuracy between positive and negative feedback, which was significantly larger than the 2.5% gap for children and the 4.2% gap for adults. This indicates that adolescents have a harder time learning from mistakes when they are highly motivated by rewards.

Methodology

Researchers tested 65 participants—consisting of 23 children, 23 early adolescents, and 19 adults—to see how motivation affects learning. Participants completed 60 trials of a non-emotional card task and 60 trials of a gambling-style game with emotional face feedback. In both tasks, participants had to learn from positive or negative feedback to win candy rewards during a guessing stage, then apply that knowledge in a later stage.

Limitations

This study does not show how extreme risk-takers learn, as participants with highly biased card choices were excluded from the final analysis. Furthermore, the findings are based entirely on a Chinese sample, where cultural emphasis on impulse control might alter the development of executive functions compared to Western populations. Finally, the study uses a rule-based associative learning task, meaning the results may not apply to probabilistic or adaptive learning environments where the correct answers remain uncertain.

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