Post-error Adjustments Research Articles

Decoding the task specificity of post-error adjustments: Features and determinants

Errors typically trigger post-error adjustments aimed at improving subsequent reactions within a single task, but little work has focused on whether these adjustments are task-general or task-specific across different tasks. We collected behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) data when participants performed a psychological refractory period paradigm. This paradigm required them to complete Task 1 and Task 2 separated by a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Behaviorally, post-error slowing and post-error accuracy exhibited task-general features at short SOAs but some task-specific features at long SOAs. EEG results manifest that task-general adjustments had a short-lived effect, whereas task-specific adjustments were long-lasting. Moreover, error awareness specifically conduced to the improvement of subsequent sensory processing and behavior performance in Task 1 (the task where errors occurred). These findings demonstrate that post-error adjustments rely on both transient, task-general interference and longer-lasting, task-specific control mechanisms simultaneously, with error awareness playing a crucial role in determining these mechanisms. We further discuss the contribution of central resources to the task specificity of post-error adjustments.

The Impact of Skill Level on the Integration of Information and Post-Error Adjustment during Action Anticipation in Basketball.

The present study examined the impact of skill level on the integration of contextual prior information and kinematic information alongside post-error adjustment during action anticipation in basketball. Twenty-three collegiate basketball players and twenty-three control participants engaged in anticipating as quickly and accurately as possible the outcomes of free throws, utilizing video clips depicting basketball players' actions, both with and without contextual prior information. Anticipatory performance and the difference in anticipatory performance following errors and correct responses were analyzed based on skill level and the congruency of contextual prior information (none, congruent, and incongruent). The findings revealed that the congruency of contextual prior information significantly affects action anticipation, with skill level moderating this effect. Moreover, skill level influenced the congruency effect on accuracy discrepancies between post-error and post-correct trials during action anticipation, with controls showing greater sensitivity to previous trial performance compared to experts. These results provide further evidence for the notion that individuals employ Bayesian reliability-based strategies to integrate different information sources and underscore the role of skill level in adjusting anticipatory judgments following errors during action anticipation. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that differentiate skill levels in action anticipation, potentially guiding the development of targeted training interventions.

Post-error adjustments occur in both reaching and grasping.

Post-error slowing (PES), the tendency to slow down a behavioral response after a previous error, has typically been investigated during simple cognitive tasks using response time as a measure of PES magnitude. More recently, PES was investigated during a single reach-to-grasp task to determine where post-error adjustments are employed in a more ecological setting. Kinematic analyses in the previous study detected PES during pre-movement planning and within the grasping component of movement execution. In the current study (N = 22), we increased the cognitive demands of a reach-to-grasp task by adding a choice between target and distractor locations to further explore PES, and other post-error adjustments, under different task conditions. We observed a significant main effect of task condition on overall reaction time (RT); however, it did not significantly impact PES or other post-error adjustments. Nonetheless, the results of this study suggest post-error adjustment is a flexible process that can be observed during pre-movement planning and within the onset and magnitude of the reaching component, as well as in the magnitudes of the grasping component. Considering the sum of the results in the context of existing literature, we conclude that the findings add support to a functional account of error reactivity, such that post-error adjustments are implemented intentionally to improve performance.

Task-general or specific: The alertness modulates post-error adjustment

Previous studies have shown that alertness is closely related to executive control function, but its impact on components of post-error adjustment is unknown. This study applied the Attentional Networks Test and the Four-choice Flanker task with three response stimulus intervals (RSIs) to explore the correlation between alertness and post-error adjustment. The linear mixed-effects model of alertness and RSI on the post-error processing indicators showed a significant negative correlation between the alertness and post-error slowing (PES) under 200 ms RSI , as well as between alertness and post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA) under both 700 ms RSI and 1200 ms RSI. Participants with lower alertness showed larger post-error slowing in the early stages, while those with higher alertness had smaller PIA in later stages. This study revealed the effects of alertness on different processing components of post-error adjustment. The control strategies utilized by individuals with high and low levels of alertness differed in preparation for performance monitoring. Alertness improved post-error response speed in a task-unspecific manner, but not post-error adaptation.

Neural and Behavioral Measures of Stress-induced Impairment in Error Awareness and Post-error Adjustment.

Exposure to stress negatively affects error processing, but the impact of stress on error awareness remains to be determined. In the present study, we examined the temporal dynamics of error awareness and post-error adjustment following acute stress. Forty-nine healthy men were randomly assigned to the control (n = 26) or stress group (n = 23). After stress induction, participants completed the error awareness task, and their brain activity was assessed by electroencephalography. Compared to the control group, the stress group demonstrated lower error awareness accuracy and smaller Pe (error positivity) and ΔPe amplitudes following aware error responses, which indicated impairment of error awareness following stress. Furthermore, the stress group had lower accuracy in post-aware error responses than in post-unaware error responses and the control group, which indicated poor post-error adjustment following stress. Our results showed a stress effect on sequential stages of error processing. Stress induces impaired error identification, which further generates maladaptive post-error performance.

When Response Selection Becomes Gambling: Post-error Slowing and Speeding in Self-paced Colour Discrimination Tasks

People tend to slow down after committing an error in many tasks. However, some studies failed to observe such post-error slowing. Furthermore, recent work found speeding after another type of sub-optimal outcomes: people often speed up after losses in gambling situations. What features determine whether people slow down or speed up after sub-optimal outcomes (error vs. loss)? To answer this question, we focused on the role of task characteristics and control over the outcome, by making a task where we previously observed post-error slowing more like tasks where we previously observed post-loss speeding. First, we made a color-discrimination task completely self-paced (Experiment 1A) and added reward/punishment (Experiment 1B). In both experiments, post-error slowing was observed, without modulation by reward/punishment. We then manipulated task difficulty to investigate the influence of control over the outcome. Consistent with our predictions, control over the outcome modulated post-error adjustments, as participants slowed down after controllable errors, but sped up after uncontrollable errors (Experiment 3). Importantly, this effect was global as post-error speeding was observed when controllable and ’uncontrollable’ errors were intermixed (Experiment 2), suggesting an influence of overall task context. Thus, responses to sub-optimal outcomes might depend on the control over the outcome.

Exploring the Functional Role of Post-Error Adjustments during a Flanker Task

Exploring the Functional Role of Post-Error Adjustments during a Flanker Task

Stress-induced impairment reveals the stage and features of post-error adaptive adjustment.

An increased reaction time often occurs after error responses (post-error slowing, PES). However, the role of top-down regulation in post-error processing remains to be debated. Impairing cognitive control function through acute stress would help to investigate the role and stage of top-down adaptive regulation in post-error processing. Here, we recruited 50 healthy male participants who were randomly assigned to either a stress condition (Trier Social Stress Task, TSST) or a control condition (control version of the TSST). A color-word Stroop task with different response stimulus intervals (RSIs) was used to investigate the effects of acute stress on different stages of post-error processing. The results showed that cortisol, heart rate, perceived stress level, and negative affect were higher in the stress group (n = 24) than in the control group (n = 26), indicating successful stress induction. The accuracy of post-error response in the control group increased with the extension of RSI, and the reaction time decreased. However, the accuracy of 1,200 ms RSI was close to that of 700 ms RSI in the stress group but was significantly lower than that in the control group. The results suggested that acute stress caused the impairment of top-down adaptive regulation after error. Furthermore, our study manifested adaptive adjustment only in the late stages of post-error processing, indicating the phasic and adaptive features of post-error adjustment.

Post-error adjustments depend causally on executive attention: Evidence from an intervention study.

Detecting and correcting execution errors is crucial for safe and efficient goal-directed behavior. Despite intensive investigations on error processing, the cognitive foundations of this process remain unclear. Based on the presumed relation between executive attention (EA) and error processing, we implemented a seven-day EA intervention by adopting the Posner cueing paradigm to test the potential causal link from EA to error processing in healthy adults. The experimental group (high EA, HEA) was trained on the Posner cueing paradigm, with a ratio of invalid cue (IC) trials to valid cue (VC) trials of 5:1 and a corresponding ratio of 1:1 in the active control group (low EA, LEA). We found that the EA intervention improved EA across intervention sessions. Critically, after the EA intervention, the HEA group showed that post-error accuracy (PEA) was restored to the same level as the post-correct accuracy (in comparison with the LEA group). However, post-error slowing and the flanker effect were not modulated by the EA intervention. Furthermore, we observed that the changes in the accuracy of VC trials positively predicted the changes in PEA and that the two groups were classified according to the changes in PEA with a 61.3% accuracy. Based on these results, we propose that EA causally drives error processing. And the capabilities of the “actively catch” more attention resources and the automatic mismatch processing developed after EA intervention is transferable to error processing, thereby directly resulting in the gains in post-error adjustments. Our work informs the potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this causal link.

Decoding the Specificity of Post-Error Adjustments Using EEG-Based Multivariate Pattern Analysis.

Errors can elicit post-error adjustments that serve to optimize performance by preventing further errors. An essential but unsolved issue is that whether post-error adjustments are domain-general or domain-specific, which was investigated in the present study through eliciting different types of errors. Behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded when male and female subjects performed the Eriksen flanker task. For this study, we examined the aforementioned issue by combining event-related potential and multivariate pattern analysis. The results indicated that post-error slowing, error-related negativity, and error positivity were comparable between congruent and incongruent errors, indicating that errors triggered domain-general interference mechanisms, whereas post-error accuracy and late positive potential elicited by incongruent errors were larger than those elicited by congruent errors, exhibiting domain-specific control adjustment mechanisms. Importantly, no successful decoding soon after errors was found between congruent and incongruent errors, but above-chance decoding was observed between these two types of errors with increasing time, which further support that domain-general adjustments occurred in the early stage, whereas domain-specific adjustments appeared in the late stage. Furthermore, brain-behavior correlation results suggested that the late post-error adjustments predicted subsequent behavior performance. Together, this study revealed that early domain-general interference adjustments induced by errors are reflected in error detection and error awareness, which are independent of error types; on the contrary, late domain-specific control adjustments are reflected in attentional adjustments, which are modulated by error types.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT To date, clear evidence on the specificity of post-error adjustments is lacking. The present study provides neurophysiological evidence that post-error adjustments simultaneously rely on both domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms. Event-related potential results indicated that domain-general adjustments were accompanied by the interference of error detection and error awareness. In contrast, domain-specific adjustments were associated with attentional adjustments. Multivariate pattern analysis further decoded the two features of post-error adjustments in the early stage matching the time patterns of error-related negativity and error positivity and in the late stage corresponding to the late positive potential. Temporal generalization analysis showed that domain-specific processing appeared stably in late post-error adjustments. Hence, we propose that post-error different stages may determine the specificity of post-error adjustments.

Post-error Slowing Reflects the Joint Impact of Adaptive and Maladaptive Processes During Decision Making.

Errors and their consequences are typically studied by investigating changes in decision speed and accuracy in trials that follow an error, commonly referred to as “post-error adjustments”. Many studies have reported that subjects slow down following an error, a phenomenon called “post-error slowing” (PES). However, the functional significance of PES is still a matter of debate as it is not always adaptive. That is, it is not always associated with a gain in performance and can even occur with a decline in accuracy. Here, we hypothesized that the nature of PES is influenced by one’s speed-accuracy tradeoff policy, which determines the overall level of choice accuracy in the task at hand. To test this hypothesis, we had subjects performing a task in two distinct contexts (separate days), which either promoted speed (hasty context) or cautiousness (cautious context), allowing us to consider post-error adjustments according to whether subjects performed choices with a low or high accuracy level, respectively. Accordingly, our data indicate that post-error adjustments varied according to the context in which subjects performed the task, with PES being solely significant in the hasty context (low accuracy). In addition, we only observed a gain in performance after errors in a specific trial type, suggesting that post-error adjustments depend on a complex combination of processes that affect the speed of ensuing actions as well as the degree to which such PES comes with a gain in performance.

Acute Exercise Improves Inhibitory Control but Not Error Detection in Male Violent Perpetrators: An ERPs Study With the Emotional Stop Signal Task.

Violence has been linked to the co-occurrence of cognitive dysfunction and altered activations in several brain regions. Empirical evidence demonstrated the benefits of acute exercise on motor inhibition and error detection and their neuronal processing. However, whether such effects also hold for the population with violent behaviors remains unknown. This study examined the effects of acute aerobic exercise on inhibitory control and error monitoring among violent offenders. Fifteen male violent offenders were counterbalanced into experimental protocols, which comprised a 30-min moderately aerobic exercise [60% heart rate (HR) reserve] and a 30-min reading control session. After each session, participants performed an emotional stop signal task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded simultaneously. Results showed insignificant changes in ERPs components [i.e., N2, P3, error-related negativity (ERN), and error-positivity (Pe) amplitudes] and the behavioral performance in go condition, stop accuracy, and post-error adjustments by exercise. However, the current study demonstrated that the acute exercise facilitated stop signal reaction time (SSRT) when compared to the control session regardless of emotional conditions. This is the first research to exhibit the improvements in inhibitory performance by acute exercise for violent offenders. Most importantly, this effect was independent of affective settings, expanding the existing knowledge of the influences of acute exercise on cognition. Our findings implicate the perspective of acute exercise for clinical and correctional practices.

Examining the neural correlates of error awareness in a large fMRI study.

Goal-directed behavior is dependent upon the ability to detect errors and implement appropriate posterror adjustments. Accordingly, several studies have explored the neural activity underlying error-monitoring processes, identifying the insula cortex as crucial for error awareness and reporting mixed findings with respect to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Variable patterns of activation have previously been attributed to insufficient statistical power. We therefore sought to clarify the neural correlates of error awareness in a large event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Four hundred and two healthy participants undertook the error awareness task, a motor Go/No-Go response inhibition paradigm in which participants were required to indicate their awareness of commission errors. Compared to unaware errors, aware errors were accompanied by significantly greater activity in a network of regions, including the insula cortex, supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and midline structures, such as the ACC and supplementary motor area (SMA). Error awareness activity was related to indices of task performance and dimensional measures of psychopathology in selected regions, including the insula, SMG, and SMA. Taken together, we identified a robust and reliable neural network associated with error awareness.

Learning from mistakes: Incidental encoding reveals a time-dependent enhancement of posterror target processing.

It has been known for >50 years that making an error leads to subsequent changes in performance, yet the exact nature of posterror adjustments in cognition remains debated. We posit that this is in large part due to traditional performance indices, like mean posterror response time and accuracy, being insensitive measures of trial-by-trial stimulus processing. To overcome this limitation, we devised a novel object flanker task that employed trial-unique target and distracter stimuli and was followed by a surprise recognition memory test. This allowed us to determine how errors influence incidental target and distracter encoding in a trial-specific manner. We used this approach to test the "adaptive orienting theory" of posterror processing, according to which an error triggers an initial inhibition of task processing-facilitating orienting to the error source-followed by a controlled retuning of attention to the task. To characterize the time-course of the posterror processing cascade, we combined our task with a manipulation of the response-stimulus interval (RSI), across four experiments (RSIs: 300 ms, 650 ms, ~1,000 ms; N = 96-100 per experiment). We document, for the first time, that making an error leads to a substantial (~10%) enhancement of target (but not distracter) memory on the subsequent trial, which interacts with RSI: Posterror targets were remembered better than postcorrect targets at the long (650 ms, ~1,000 ms) but not the short (300 ms) RSIs. These findings provide clear support for the adaptive orienting theory by demonstrating a novel cognitive phenomenon: a time-dependent posterror enhancement of target encoding (PETE). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Age-related post-error slowing and stimulus repetition effect in motor inhibition during a stop-signal task

This study aims to investigate how older adults react to a failed-inhibition error while performing a stop-signal task. That is, whether elderly people would exhibit enlarged post-error slowing and whether such slowing revealed an adaptive process, maladaptive process, or a mixture of maladaptive followed by adaptive processes. This study also addresses if the post-error process might further interact with a stimulus repetition effect based on the memory retrieval explanation. A group of 34 younger adults (age range 20-30years) and a group of 34 older adults (age range 60-80years) were included for the analyses. The results of the current study supported a mixture model by showing that older adults exhibited a larger post-error slowing than younger adults, and their post-error slowing was initially accompanied by deceased accuracy that then increased on the subsequent trial. Furthermore, such post-error slowing on older adults only occurred in the trial condition where the stimulus was repeated from the previous trial suggesting a memory-based process (a form of negative priming) involved in post-error processes. The implication of the current finding is that older adults might maintain the ability to detect and monitor the response error, yet their post-error adjustment might require a much longer time to start functioning well after the initial detrimental orienting response to the error and the entire process was memory-based.

Effects of Trait Anxiety on Error Processing and Post-error Adjustments: An Event-Related Potential Study With Stop-Signal Task

The present study aimed to use event-related potentials with the stop-signal task to investigate the effects of trait anxiety on inhibitory control, error monitoring, and post-error adjustments. The stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) was used to evaluate the behavioral competence of inhibitory control. Electrophysiological signals of error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe) were used to study error perception and error awareness, respectively. Post-error slowing (PES) was applied to examine the behavioral adjustments after making errors. The results showed that SSRT and PES did not differ significantly between individuals with high trait anxiety (HTA) and those with low trait anxiety (LTA). However, individuals with HTA demonstrated reduced ERN amplitudes and prolonged Pe latencies than those with LTA. Prolonged Pe latencies were also significantly associated with poorer post-error adjustments. In conclusion, HTA led to reduced cortical responses to error monitoring. Furthermore, inefficient conscious awareness of errors might lead to maladaptive post-error adjustments.

Post-error adjustment among children aged 7 years with a familial high risk of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder: A population-based cohort study.

The cognitive control system matures gradually with age and shows age-related sex differences. To gain knowledge concerning error adaptation in familial high-risk groups, investigating error adaptation among the offspring of parents with severe mental disorders is important and may contribute to the understanding of cognitive functioning in at-risk individuals. We identified an observational cohort through Danish registries and measured error adaptation using an Eriksen flanker paradigm. We tested 497 7-year-old children with a familial high risk of schizophrenia (N = 192) or bipolar disorder (N = 116) for deficits in error adaptation compared with a control group (N = 189). We investigated whether error adaptation differed between high-risk groups compared with controls and sex differences in the adaptation to errors, irrespective of high-risk status. Overall, children exhibited post-error slowing (PES), but the slowing of responses did not translate to significant improvements in accuracy. No differences were detected between either high-risk group compared with the controls. Boys showed less PES and PES after incongruent trials than girls. Our results suggest that familial high risk of severe mental disorders does not influence error adaptation at this early stage of cognitive control development. Error adaptation behavior at age 7 years shows specific sex differences.

The relationship between childhood stress and distinct stages of dynamic behavior monitoring in adults: neural and behavioral correlates.

Childhood adversity is a major risk factor for emotional and cognitive disorders later in adulthood. Behavior monitoring, one of the most important components of cognitive control, plays a crucial role in flexible interaction with the environment. Here, we test a novel conceptual model discriminating between two distinct dimensions of childhood adversity (i.e. deprivation and threat) and examine their relations to dynamic stages of behavior monitoring. Sixty young healthy adults participated in this study using event-related potentials and the dynamic stages of behavior monitoring including response inhibition, error detection and post-error adjustments were investigated in a classical Go/NoGo task. Multiple regression analyses revealed that participants with higher severity of childhood adversity recruited more controlled attention, as indicated by larger (more negative) conflict detection–related NoGo-N2 amplitudes and larger (more negative) error detection–related error-related negativity amplitudes. Higher severity of childhood abuse (an indicator of threat) was related to smaller (less positive) error appraisal–related error positivity amplitudes on the neural level and subsequently lower post-error accuracy on the behavioral level. These results suggested that prefrontal-supported controlled attention is influenced by universal adversity in childhood while the error-related behavioral adjustment is mainly affected by childhood abuse, indicating the dimensions of deprivation and threat are at least partially distinct.

Examining the effect of perceived performance-contingent gains, losses and errors on arithmetic.

Gains and losses have previously been found to differentially modulate Executive Functions and cognitive performance depending on performance contingency. Following recent findings suggesting that random gains and losses modulate arithmetic performance, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of perceived performance-contingent gains and losses on arithmetic performance. In the current study, an arithmetic equation judgment task was administered, with perceived performance-contingent gain, loss, and error feedback presented upon each trial. The results from two experiments suggest that when perceiving gain and loss as performance-contingent, the modulation of arithmetic performance, seen previously under random contingency conditions was entirely eliminated. In addition, another type of feedback was examined in the context of an arithmetic task: post-error adjustments. When performance after error feedback was compared to performance after other aversive performance feedback such as loss signals, only errors, but not other aversive feedback, modulated performance in the subsequent trial. These findings further extend the knowledge regarding the influence of gain and loss situations, as well as errors, on arithmetic performance.

Are post-error adjustments influenced by beliefs in free will? A failure to replicate Rigoni, Wilquin, Brass and Burle, 2013.

In this pre-registered study, we tried to replicate the study by Rigoni et al. 2013 Cognition 127, 264–269. In the original study, the authors manipulated the participants’ belief in free will in a between-subject design and subsequently measured post-error slowing (i.e. slower responses after an incorrect trial compared with a correct trial) as a marker of cognitive control. They found less post-error slowing in the group with reduced belief in free will (anti-free will group) compared with a control group in which belief in free will was not manipulated. In the present study, we used the same task procedure and the same free will manipulation (Crick text) in an attempt to replicate these findings. However, we used an online procedure and a larger sample size in order to address concerns about statistical power. Similar to the original study, we also used a questionnaire to measure beliefs in free will as an independent manipulation check. We found a difference in the scores on the questionnaire, thus a reduced belief in free will, after reading the Crick text. However, we did not find any difference in post-error slowing between the anti-free will and control groups. Our findings are in line with several other recent findings suggesting that the Crick text manipulation affects the participants’ self-reported belief in free will but not their behaviour. The present study can be considered a high-powered failed replication attempt.