ERP components on reaction errors and their functional significance: a tutorial
Section snippets
Introduction and overview
In cognitive psychology, performance errors are often neglected. However, the investigation of the reasons for, as well as the consequences of, errors are of crucial importance not only for fundamental, but also for applied research, such as cognitive ergonomics. One reason for this neglect might be the lack of theories concerning mechanisms of errors. A methodological reason is the generally low error rate, and the usually large variation of error rate across subjects, which makes the
Methods
The following data were collected within six experiments. In all experiments, young healthy subjects were tested; in experiments 5 and 6, 12 elderly subjects were tested in addition to the young.
In all these experiments we had highly trained subjects perform speeded choice or Go/Nogo reactions to visual or auditory stimuli which were presented with an interstimulus interval (ISI) of about 2 s. Specifically, the subjects performed two-way choice reactions (Experiments 1–4), 4-way choice
Conclusions
In our original paper we proposed that the Ne is a correlate of error detection in the sense of a mismatch signal when representations of the actual response and of the required response are compared. This hypothesis was tested in six experiments with two- and four-alternative choice and Go/Nogo reaction tasks.
A general observation is, the easier errors can be detected, the larger the Ne and/or the earlier it occurs relative to the incorrect key press. Moreover, in conditions where the response
Acknowledgements
This research was partly supported by grant Ho 965/5-1 from the DFG. Thanks to Ludger Blanke and Christiane Westedt for their great help in all experiments.
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