Original title: Delayed Feedback Improves Learning in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease
Kai Sucich, Christopher J. Cagna, Erica Weber, Ekaterina Dobryakova · September 2026
People with Parkinson’s diseaseA brain disorder that affects movement and can also cause problems with memory and learning. often have trouble learning and remembering new things. Usually, learning relies on getting feedback about whether you got an answer right or wrong. However, the brains of individuals with Parkinson’s struggle to process this feedback if it arrives right away. Researchers tested whether making people wait for their results could help. They asked participants to learn word pairs using three different feedback schedules: immediately, after waiting 6 seconds, or after waiting 25 minutes. Pausing feedback gives the brain a better chance to process the outcome during memory tasks. The researchers found that both the 6-second delay and the 25-minute delay led to significantly greater learning improvement than immediate feedback. They also discovered that people with stronger working memory, tested through backward number recall, improved the most when waiting 25 minutes. Giving the brain extra time before feedback clearly improves learning in Parkinson’s disease.
You are baking cookies and following a recipe. If someone tastes the dough after every step and tells you if it's right, you might forget the overall process. But if they wait until the cookies are baked to give feedback, you have to mentally rehearse each step, which strengthens your memory of the recipe. In this paper, delaying feedback on word pairs works the same way: waiting forces the brain to work harder and improves learning.
People with Parkinson’s often struggle to learn from immediate feedback. This study shows that delaying feedback by seconds or even 25 minutes can significantly improve how well they learn new information. That insight could reshape rehabilitation programs and daily learning strategies for millions of patients.
The abstract notes the analysis was exploratory and involved only 30 PD participants using one type of declarative memory task. It does not compare to healthy controls or other feedback intervals, so results may not generalize beyond these conditions.
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Delayed Feedback Improves Learning in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease — Kai Sucich, Christopher J. Cagna, Erica Weber et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/dvq2a_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.