Disruptive Effects of Feedback

Abstract

Although feedback can help in detecting and correcting errors, and in learning new behaviors, feedback can also disrupt ongoing action. Many perceptual-motor systems exhibit feedback-induced disruptions, and speech production under conditions of “delayed auditory feedback” provides the most dramatic and carefully studied example. When auditory feedback from speech is recorded and then played back with amplification to the ears after a delay of about 0.2 s, speech becomes severely disrupted. Under these conditions, proficient speakers repeat, prolong, and substitute speech sounds, sometimes producing phonemes that are not part of any language familiar to them (B. S. Lee, 1950). The present chapter examines this and other feedback-induced disruptions and the constraints they impose on theoretical relationships between perception and action.

All purposeful behavior may be considered to require negative feedback.

(Rosenblueth, Wiener, & Bigelow, 1943, pp. 22).

This is an exciting period for the study of action.

(Gentner, 1985, p. 184).