Abstract
Recent electrophysiological research has sought to elucidate the neural mechanisms necessary for the conscious awareness of action errors. Much of this work has focused on the error positivity (Pe), a neural signal that is specifically elicited by errors that have been consciously perceived. While awareness appears to be an essential prerequisite for eliciting the Pe, the precise functional role of this component has not been identified. Twenty-nine participants performed a novel variant of the Go/No-go Error Awareness Task (EAT) in which awareness of commission errors was indicated via a separate speeded manual response. Independent component analysis (ICA) was used to isolate the Pe from other stimulus- and response-evoked signals. Single-trial analysis revealed that Pe peak latency was highly correlated with the latency at which awareness was indicated. Furthermore, the Pe was more closely related to the timing of awareness than it was to the initial erroneous response. This finding was confirmed in a separate study which derived IC weights from a control condition in which no indication of awareness was required, thus ruling out motor confounds. A receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) curve analysis showed that the Pe could reliably predict whether an error would be consciously perceived up to 400 ms before the average awareness response. Finally, Pe latency and amplitude were found to be significantly correlated with overall error awareness levels between subjects. Our data show for the first time that the temporal dynamics of the Pe trace the emergence of error awareness. These findings have important implications for interpreting the results of clinical EEG studies of error processing.
Highlights
The ability to detect errors is an essential prerequisite for adaptive behavior, signaling that performance levels are inadequate to achieve current goals
Of the relatively small number of studies that asked participants to explicitly signal any errors they made, a majority have reported that the amplitude of the errorrelated negativity (ERN) is unaffected by error awareness whereas the Pe is only present on error trials that are consciously perceived as such (Nieuwenhuis et al, 2001; Endrass et al, 2005; Overbeek et al, 2005; O’Connell et al, 2007; Shalgi et al, 2009; Dhar et al, 2011)
After isolating the Pe in this way, we demonstrate via a combination of within-subjects single-trial analyses, ROC classification analysis and between-subjects correlations that this component is closely tied to the latency of the awareness response, suggesting it provides an index of the emergence of error awareness
Summary
The ability to detect errors is an essential prerequisite for adaptive behavior, signaling that performance levels are inadequate to achieve current goals. Our understanding of the neural networks involved in such a process has greatly increased in recent decades (Botvinick et al, 2004; Ridderinkhof et al, 2004; Yeung et al, 2004), but researchers have not typically made the important distinction between error detection and conscious error awareness. The Pe has variously been suggested to reflect conscious recognition that an error has occurred (Nieuwenhuis et al, 2001; Endrass et al, 2005), a P3b-like potential in response to the motivational significance of an error (Leuthold and Sommer, 1999; Ridderinkhof et al, 2009), delayed stimulus processing (Shalgi et al, 2009) and, most recently, the accumulation of evidence that an error has occurred (Steinhauser and Yeung, 2010; see Ullsperger et al, 2010; Wessel et al, 2011). Disambiguating whether the Pe may reflect processes that contribute to, or result
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