Van der Borght Liesbet, Braem Senne, Stevens Michaël, Notebaert Wim
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2016 Feb;164:34-8. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.12.007. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
Individual differences in anxiety and punishment sensitivity have an impact on electrophysiological markers of error processing and the orienting of attention to threatening information. However, it remains unclear how these individual differences influence behavioral adaptations to errors. Therefore, we set out to investigate the influence of anxiety and punishment sensitivity on post-error adaptations, and whether this influence depends on the time people get to adapt. We tested 99 participants using a Simon task with randomized inter-trial intervals. Significant post-error slowing (PES) was found at all time intervals. However, in line with previous research, PES reduced over time. While PES did not interact with anxiety, or punishment sensitivity, the pattern of post-error accuracy depended on anxiety. There is clear post-error accuracy decrease at the shortest interval, but individuals with a low score on trait anxiety showed a reversed effect (i.e., post-error accuracy increase) at a longer interval. These results suggest that people have trouble to disengage attention from an error, which can be overcome with time and low anxiety.
焦虑和惩罚敏感性的个体差异会影响错误加工的电生理指标以及对威胁性信息的注意定向。然而，尚不清楚这些个体差异如何影响对错误的行为适应。因此，我们着手研究焦虑和惩罚敏感性对错误后适应的影响，以及这种影响是否取决于人们进行适应的时间。我们使用具有随机试间间隔的西蒙任务对99名参与者进行了测试。在所有时间间隔均发现了显著的错误后反应减慢（PES）。然而，与先前的研究一致，PES随时间减少。虽然PES与焦虑或惩罚敏感性没有相互作用，但错误后准确性的模式取决于焦虑。在最短的时间间隔内，错误后准确性明显下降，但特质焦虑得分低的个体在较长时间间隔内表现出相反的效果（即错误后准确性增加）。这些结果表明，人们难以将注意力从错误上转移，而随着时间推移和低焦虑水平，这一问题可以得到克服。
