Summary: A new study reveals the brain’s swift response to human errors compared to unintended outcomes. When individuals were tasked with identifying arrow directions, researchers observed the brain differentiating between correct responses followed by unexpected symbols and actual mistakes.
The study found that the brain recognizes an error within one second and then engages in a longer process to prevent future errors. This process was absent when the outcome wasn’t a direct result of an action, indicating a specialized error-awareness mechanism in the brain.
Key Facts:
- The human brain can identify an error as the cause of an unexpected outcome in about one second.
- The brain exhibits prolonged activity after recognizing a mistake, signaling a period of internal communication to avoid repeating the error.
- The research used EEGs to observe unique neural activity associated with human error, supporting the existence of a specialized error-detection system in the brain.
Source: University of Iowa
The human mind does not like to make mistakes—and makes time to avoid repeating them.
A new study from University of Iowa researchers shows how the human brain, in just one second, can distinguish between an outcome caused by human error and one in which the person is not directly to blame.
Moreover, the researchers found, in cases of human error, the brain takes additional time to catalog the error and inform the rest of the body about it to avoid repeating the miscue.
“The novel aspect about this study is the brain can very quickly distinguish whether an undesirable outcome is due to a (human) error, or due to something else,” says Jan Wessel, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Iowa and the study’s corresponding author.
“If the brain realizes an error was the cause, it will then start additional processes to avoid further errors, which it won’t do if the outcome wasn’t due to its own action.”
The Iowa researchers learned about the brain’s ability to separate human error from a non-self-inflicted error by asking 76 young adults to look at a cluster of arrows and choose the correct direction one specific arrow was pointing. Nearly every time the subjects responded—almost always correctly, given the task’s simplicity—a triangle would appear on the screen.
But every now and then, another symbol (an anchor, frog, helicopter, etc.) would appear on screen, meant to mimic a “surprise” or unexpected outcome, and, importantly, appearing even when the subject responded correctly and expected the triangle symbol.
The researchers measured at three different intervals (350, 1,700, and 3,000 milliseconds) how the brain responded to situations with the standard outcome (the triangle) and the surprise outcome (a different symbol).
What they found is that the brain can distinguish between the two outcomes after about one second (1,000 milliseconds).
If human error is the reason for the outcome, the brain remains active for an additional two to three seconds, the researchers found. That means the brain realizes a mistake was made, and essentially wants to learn from it.
“When it is something that has to do with my own action and I can do something about it, then the brain takes a few seconds to reconfigure the entire cognitive apparatus, the visual system, the motor system,” says Wessel, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Neurology.
“It’s as if the brain is taking a moment to fill in the rest of the body, the senses, the motor control, to tell the other working parts, ‘Let’s not do this again.’”
The researchers also measured brain waves through scalp electroencephalograms (EEGs) and observed ongoing neural activity that was unique to instances when human error occurred.
“Indeed, we found that while both errors and unexpected outcomes of correct actions led to comparable neural activity early on, only errors showed reliable, sustained brain activity more than a second after the response,” Wessel says.
Previous research had shown the brain can recognize instances when human error has occurred, but there was debate about whether the brain’s reaction to an outcome was the same regardless of whether the cause was human error or not.
“Some have argued that we don’t actually have a genuine error detection system in the brain,” Wessel notes.
But Wessel’s research demonstrates that the brain does make an error/no error distinction and communicates information related to either outcome with the rest of the body.
“All in all, this shows that we do have genuine, error-specific systems in the human brain that detect our action errors that trigger adaptive responses, such as the strategic slowing of ongoing actions,” Wessel says.
The study, “Early action error processing is due to domain-general surprise while later processing is error-specific,” was published online Oct. 13 in JNeurosci, a journal of the Society for Neuroscience.
The study’s first author is Yoojeong Choo, a graduate student in Wessel’s lab. A co-author is Alec Mather, an Iowa graduate who worked in Wessel’s lab as an undergraduate and is now data science manager at Sony Music Entertainment.
Funding: The National Institutes of Health funded the research.
About this Neuroscience research news
Author: Richard Lewis
Source: University of Iowa
Contact: Richard Lewis – University of Iowa
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Early action error processing is due to domain-general surprise while later processing is error-specific” by Jan Wessel et al. Journal of Neuroscience
Abstract
Early action error processing is due to domain-general surprise while later processing is error-specific
The ability to adapt behavior after erroneous actions is one of the key aspects of cognitive control. Error commission typically causes people to slow down their subsequent actions [post-error slowing (PES)].
Recent work has challenged the notion that PES reflects adaptive, controlled processing and instead suggests that it is a side effect of the surprising nature of errors. Indeed, human neuroimaging suggests that the brain networks involved in processing errors overlap with those processing error-unrelated surprise, calling into question whether there is a specific system for error processing in the brain at all.
In the current study, we used EEG decoding and a novel behavioral paradigm to test whether there are indeed unique, error-specific processes that contribute to PES beyond domain-general surprise.
Across two experiments in male and female humans (N = 76), we found that both errors and error-unrelated surprise were followed by slower responses when response–stimulus intervals were short.
Furthermore, the early neural processes following error-specific and domain-general surprise showed significant cross-decoding. However, at longer intervals, which provided additional processing time, only errors were still followed by post-trial slowing.
Furthermore, this error-specific PES effect was reflected in sustained neural activity that could be decoded from that associated with domain-general surprise, with the strongest contributions found at lateral frontal, occipital, and sensorimotor scalp sites.
These findings suggest that errors and surprise initially share common processes, but that after additional processing time, unique, genuinely error-specific processes take over and contribute to behavioral adaptation.
