The Influences Of Post-error Conflict And Executive Control On Post-error Response

People usually slow down their responses after having committed an error for the sake of responding flexibly to the changes cropping in the environment. In order to better understand the development of human adaptive behavior, it is very important and meaningful to investigate characteristics and regularity of the post-error adjustments. The research on the post-error adjustment, contributes to a in-depth exploration of error detection mechanisms, as well as to understand the role of error with its associated adjustment in the process of behavior learning and development.Based on the results of previous studies, we believe that the impact of error on the post-error response has mainly been manifested in two aspects. First, the conflict between the stimulus-response link in the previous error trial and one in the post-error trial impairs performances of post-error task. Second, executive control activated by error detection force people to adopt a conservative response strategy by varying the response criterion of next trial. To substantiate the two facets stated above, five experiments have been launched in current study.Stroop paradigm was used in experiment 1 to estimate the conflicts in post-error responses. It was found that N2 amplitude relating to conflict increased in the post-error correct trials, indicating that post-error conflict emerged and its level can be measured by way of N2 amplitude.The match or mismatch of responses between error trials and post-error trials and the level of RSI were manipulated in Experiment 2 to examine their effects on post-error performances. It was found that the conflict and PES decreased as the desired response in the previous error trial was matched with the current response, and the conflict varied with RSI. When RSI increased, the conflict during post-error trials decreased. The post-error trial was benefited from the priming effect of the response repetition when RSI was 800ms. The results indicated that PES was affected by executive control and the conflict during the post-error trials.The impact of compatibility of the error trial on PES was further examined in Experiment 3. It was found that the reaction time and PES varied with the changes in compatibility of the error trial in the opposite direction. Both-the conflict in stimulus-response links and cognitive control were responsible for the variation of PES. The conflict usually leads to the changes of PES, while cognitive control forces people to use the conservative response strategy.The reaction time of correct response after correction error or non-correction error was compared to discover the mechanism of correction error to change post-error response changes in Experiment 4. For non-correction error trials, it was found that the post-error reaction was delayed and the N2 amplitude increased when the error was corrected. For correction error trials, the post-error conflict reduced and N2 declined, but PES was still exist. This result indicated that the cognitive control was still involved in the post-error adjustment. In the situations that errors were non-corrected, there was an obvious positive deflection (Pe) following the ERN. But it disappeared in the correction group. In contrast, there was no significant difference in the ERN. It was deduced that the post-error conflict and the executive control made different impact on the post-error response.Whether the influence of cognitive control on post-error response was different among different tasks? Previous studies were carried out in some fast reaction situations, but the trade-off between the reaction time and accuracy always exists during these tasks. The roles of the cognitive control on the transformation of classification rules were explore with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test in Experiment 5. The results showed that the engagement of executive control was different when the rules were converted compared with when the rules were not converted. It was the same pattern in the amplitude of P400, as it appeared discrepancy in the error feedback followed by rules conversion or by rules non-conversion.It was concluded that both the conflict between stimulus-response links and cognitive control lead a combined effects on the variation of post-error responses. The conflict between stimulus-response links was usually reflected in the increase of N2 amplitude, which cognitive control resulted in the changes of Pe or P400 amplitude after a negative feedback. In the contrast, the ERN amplitude was immune to the variance of performance in the post-error responses.