Abstract
The purpose of this online study was to examine the effectiveness of concurrent positive and negative visual feedback on the performance of a rotary-pursuit task. One hundred and nine physical education students were randomly assigned to three groups: a positive feedback group (n = 37), a negative feedback group (n = 35), and a control group (no feedback; n = 37). The students participated from their own home computers and performed an easy, moderate, and difficult rotary-pursuit task. On Day 1, the participants performed a pre-test with no feedback and practiced eight trials of each level of difficulty with the assigned feedback. On Day 2, they practiced eight trials of each level of difficulty again. On Day 3, they practiced eight trials of each level of difficulty with feedback and performed a post-test with no feedback. Finally, the participants were asked to report their subjective assessment of the task difficulty. The main findings were that in the task of moderate difficulty, negative feedback led to the best performance during practice. In addition, regardless of the difficulty level, practicing with negative feedback led to the best performance in the post-test. The results suggest that task difficulty moderates the effects of feedback on performance and that providing concurrent negative visual feedback in a continuous task may be more advantageous.