Abstract
In everyday life, error monitoring and processing are important for improving ongoing performance in response to a changing environment. However, detecting an error is not always a conscious process. The temporal activation patterns of brain areas related to cognitive control in the absence of conscious awareness of an error remain unknown. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain were used to explore the neural bases of unconscious error detection when subjects solved a Chinese anagram task. Our ERP data showed that the unconscious error detection (UED) response elicited a more negative ERP component (N2) than did no error (NE) and detect error (DE) responses in the 300–400-ms time window, and the DE elicited a greater late positive component (LPC) than did the UED and NE in the 900–1200-ms time window after the onset of the anagram stimuli. Taken together with the results of dipole source analysis, the N2 (anterior cingulate cortex) might reflect unconscious/automatic conflict monitoring, and the LPC (superior/medial frontal gyrus) might reflect conscious error recognition.
Highlights
The brain needs to continuously monitor behavior in real time to accomplish specific tasks
Error detection occurs when an error is detected by the brain but the subject is unaware of the error, whereas error awareness is defined as the ability to explicitly report the error verbally or press a key to indicate the error [4,6,7,8]
The nonlexical anagram that subjects thought could not be reconstructed into a correct character imposed an increasing load on the working memory in the detect error (DE) response, so the reaction time (RT) of the DE response were significantly longer than those of the unconscious error detection (UED) and no error (NE)
Summary
The brain needs to continuously monitor behavior in real time to accomplish specific tasks. The error monitoring system helps to correct immediate behavioral faults[5]. Many researchers have been suggesting that error processing might be executed at different levels of consciousness, and the processing of error detection and error awareness occurs at different levels in the error monitoring system. Error detection occurs when an error is detected by the brain but the subject is unaware of the error, whereas error awareness is defined as the ability to explicitly report the error verbally or press a key to indicate the error [4,6,7,8]. We make a mistake but are not aware of it, so researchers pay more attention to error detection
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