Enhancing attention: Exploring the advantages of competence-supporting feedback and the drawbacks of competence-thwarting feedback

Attentiveness is often considered as essential for learning, but there is a limited amount of literature on the impact of supervisor feedback on attention. This study investigated attentional performance in response to competence-related feedback from supervisors. It was hypothesized that both competence-supporting and competence-thwarting feedback would enhance attentional performance relative to neutral feedback, but that competence-thwarting feedback would increase dependence on attentional cues, resulting in faster reaction times but potentially higher error rates, particularly on incongruent trials. Seventy-four male participants (mean age = 18.68, SD =.76) took part in a modified Posner paradigm task, responding as quickly as possible to 200 stimuli per condition. Prior to stimulus presentation, in a pre-recorded video a supervisor provided indications as to where the target stimuli may appear, with trials categorized as follows: 50% congruent, 25% incongruent, and 25% uncued. Participants experienced two conditions involving competence-related video feedback: neutral followed by competence-supporting or -thwarting. Reaction times were faster under both competence-supporting and -thwarting conditions compared to the neutral condition. However, errors increased more under competence-thwarting than under competence-supporting feedback, across all trial types, whereas no statistically significant change in errors was detected under competence-supporting feedback. Because the neutral condition always preceded the feedback condition, changes in performance could not be disentangled from potential practice and task-familiarization effects. Accordingly, the findings were interpreted primarily in terms of differences in performance change between the supportive and thwarting feedback groups.