Fievez Fanny, Derosiere Gerard, Verbruggen Frederick, Duque Julie
Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Jun 9;16:864590. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.864590. eCollection 2022.
Errors and their consequences are typically studied by investigating changes in decision speed and accuracy in trials that follow an error, commonly referred to as "post-error adjustments". Many studies have reported that subjects slow down following an error, a phenomenon called "post-error slowing" (PES). However, the functional significance of PES is still a matter of debate as it is not always adaptive. That is, it is not always associated with a gain in performance and can even occur with a decline in accuracy. Here, we hypothesized that the nature of PES is influenced by one's speed-accuracy tradeoff policy, which determines the overall level of choice accuracy in the task at hand. To test this hypothesis, we had subjects performing a task in two distinct contexts (separate days), which either promoted speed (hasty context) or cautiousness (cautious context), allowing us to consider post-error adjustments according to whether subjects performed choices with a low or high accuracy level, respectively. Accordingly, our data indicate that post-error adjustments varied according to the context in which subjects performed the task, with PES being solely significant in the hasty context (low accuracy). In addition, we only observed a gain in performance after errors in a specific trial type, suggesting that post-error adjustments depend on a complex combination of processes that affect the speed of ensuing actions as well as the degree to which such PES comes with a gain in performance.
通常通过研究错误发生后试验中决策速度和准确性的变化来探究错误及其后果，这种变化通常被称为“错误后调整”。许多研究报告称，受试者在犯错后会放慢速度，这种现象被称为“错误后减缓”（PES）。然而，PES的功能意义仍存在争议，因为它并非总是具有适应性。也就是说，它并不总是与表现的提升相关，甚至可能伴随着准确性的下降。在此，我们假设PES的本质受一个人的速度-准确性权衡策略的影响，该策略决定了手头任务中选择准确性的总体水平。为了验证这一假设，我们让受试者在两种不同的情境下（不同的日子）执行一项任务，一种情境促进速度（匆忙情境），另一种情境促进谨慎（谨慎情境），这使我们能够分别根据受试者执行选择时的准确性水平高低来考虑错误后调整。相应地，我们的数据表明，错误后调整因受试者执行任务的情境而异，PES仅在匆忙情境（低准确性）中显著。此外，我们只在特定的试验类型中观察到错误后表现有所提升，这表明错误后调整取决于影响后续行动速度以及这种PES与表现提升程度的复杂过程组合。
