Foerster Anna, Steinhauser Marco, Schwarz Katharina A, Kunde Wilfried, Pfister Roland
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Mar 9;9(3):210397. doi: 10.1098/rsos.210397. eCollection 2022 Mar.
The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error's consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here, we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feeding back directly onto ongoing motor activity, thus cancelling erroneous movements immediately. We tested this prediction of immediate auto-correction by analysing how the force of correct and erroneous keypress actions evolves over time while controlling for cognitive and biomechanical constraints relating to response time and the peak force of a movement. We conclude that the force profiles are indicative of active cancellation by showing indications of shorter response durations for errors already within the first 100 ms, i.e. between the onset and the peak of the response, a timescale that has previously been related solely to error detection. This effect increased in a late phase of responding, i.e. after response force peaked until its offset, further corroborating that it indeed reflects cancellation efforts instead of consequences of planning or initiating the error.
人类认知系统拥有高效的机制来监控正在进行的动作。一旦检测到错误的行动过程，通常认为这些机制会调整认知处理，以减轻错误的后果，并防止未来的行动失误。在此，我们证明错误检测具有更早的后果，即通过直接反馈到正在进行的运动活动上，从而立即取消错误动作。我们通过分析正确和错误按键动作的力量如何随时间演变，同时控制与反应时间和运动峰值力量相关的认知和生物力学限制，来测试这种即时自动纠正的预测。我们得出结论，力量曲线表明存在主动取消，因为在前100毫秒内，即反应开始到峰值之间，错误的反应持续时间就已显示出缩短的迹象，而这个时间尺度以前仅与错误检测相关。这种效应在反应的后期增加，即在反应力量达到峰值直到结束之后，进一步证实它确实反映了取消动作的努力，而不是计划或引发错误的后果。
