Cognitive ability is closely associated with the acquisition of programming skills, and enhancing learners' cognitive ability is a crucial factor in improving the efficacy of programming education. Adaptive feedback strategies can provide learners with personalized support based on their learning context, which helps to stimulate their interest and improve learning outcomes. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether adaptive feedback can enhance the cognitive ability of programming learners. This study applies adaptive feedback strategies to an introductory programming course by designing a quasi-experiment to analyze and reveal the effects of adaptive feedback on the cognitive ability to program learners from multiple modalities, including physiological, psychological, and behavioral data. Sixty-five first-year university students were randomly assigned to either experimental or control groups. The experimental group received adaptive feedback during the programming learning process and the control group received non-differential feedback. The findings demonstrated that adaptive feedback significantly enhances the cognitive ability of programming learners. The experimental group demonstrated superior performance in cognitive ability tests, programming examinations, and programming self-efficacy. Furthermore, adaptive feedback was found to markedly improve the cognitive processing of learners, as evidenced by the amplitude and latency of the P300 component in EEG signals, key-press reaction times and accuracy rates.