Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this experiment, we explore how teachers use evaluative feedback—such as praise and criticism, or reward and punishment—to guide learners’ behavior. Although common in daily life, there has been limited research in this area. Our study combines insights from Bayesian models of pedagogy and prior experimental research on evaluative feedback to address this gap. We defined an objective within a complex conceptual space and observe how teachers use only evaluative feedback to guide naive learners’ choice. Our findings indicate that teachers tend to structure their feedback communicatively, in a way that minimizes uncertainty and prioritizes establishing common ground. Our results offer preliminary but exciting insights into how humans teach with evaluative feedback, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the ease and agility with which we engage in intuitive teaching.