Masina Fabio, Di Rosa Elisa, Mapelli Daniela
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Department of Neuroscience, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 5;9:902. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00902. eCollection 2018.
Error awareness (EA) and post-error slowing (PES) are two crucial components of an adequate performance monitoring because, respectively, they allow being aware of an error and triggering performance adjustments following unexpected events. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the ontogenetic trajectories of EA and PES, as well as to examine how EA and PES interact with each other. The performance of three groups of participants (children, younger, and older adults) in a modified version of the Error Awareness task (EAT; Hester et al., 2005) was compared. In particular, in this study not only variations of the average performance were examined, but also intra-individual variability (IIV), considered in terms of variations of SD and ex-Gaussian parameters (, , and ). Two distinct ontogenetic trajectories of EA and PES were observed. Regarding EA, we observe a U-shaped curve that describes an increase of the process from childhood to early adulthood and a progressive reduction advancing age in late adulthood. Furthermore, a greater IIV in older adults indicated a susceptibility of EA to the aging process. The ontogenetic trajectory of PES seems substantially different from the trajectory that describes EA since in PES we do not observe age-related differences. These results suggest that EA and PES are two independent processes. Furthermore, it appears that EA and PES are differently prone to short-term fluctuations in performance across the lifespan. While EA presents an increase in IIV in aging, PES seems to be immune to these changes.
错误觉察（EA）和错误后减缓（PES）是适当绩效监测的两个关键组成部分，因为它们分别使人能够觉察到错误，并在意外事件发生后触发绩效调整。本研究的目的是调查EA和PES的个体发生轨迹，以及检验EA和PES如何相互作用。比较了三组参与者（儿童、年轻人和老年人）在错误觉察任务（EAT；Hester等人，2005）的修改版中的表现。具体而言，在本研究中，不仅考察了平均表现的变化，还考察了个体内变异性（IIV），从标准差和前高斯参数（、和）的变化方面进行考量。观察到了EA和PES两条不同的个体发生轨迹。关于EA，我们观察到一条U形曲线，它描述了从童年到成年早期该过程的增加，以及成年后期随年龄增长的逐渐减少。此外，老年人中更大的IIV表明EA对衰老过程敏感。PES的个体发生轨迹似乎与描述EA的轨迹有很大不同，因为在PES中我们未观察到与年龄相关的差异。这些结果表明EA和PES是两个独立的过程。此外，似乎EA和PES在整个生命周期中对绩效的短期波动有不同的易感性。虽然EA在衰老过程中IIV增加，但PES似乎不受这些变化的影响。
