16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
16:30 - 18:00
Room: HSZ - N1
Chair/s:
Maristella Lunardon
Everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes lead us to change the course of our action, either by stopping it or at least slowing it down, with an overall impact on subsequent decisions and behavior. Therefore, it is not surprising that human action control is governed by efficient cognitive mechanisms to monitor and regulate erroneous actions. But there is more to that. Errors not only trigger cognitive processes of monitoring and control. They are also associated with affective responses (often negative) that contribute to the chain of events initiated by the error. Moreover, although humans share basic functions for error processing, these functions may manifest differently across individuals, for example in relation to personality traits, and across contexts, such as in relation to task complexity and content.
The goal of this symposium is to provide a cross-cutting perspective on error processing research. By including contributions that use both behavioral and neurophysiological methods, the symposium seeks to bring together findings that shed light on various aspects of error processing.
The first talk examines the immediate effects of efficient error detection, which can lead to the cancellation of an ongoing erroneous action. The second talk explores the neural signatures of error processing and their links to outcomes not necessarily directly tied to mistakes. The third talk delves into individual differences, investigating how error processing relates to perfectionism. The fourth and fifth talks focus on error adjustment, offering insights respectively into affective mechanisms and into its contribution to arithmetic learning in developmental samples.
In conclusion, by providing a stage for diverse themes and methodologies in the study of error processing, this symposium set itself the task of promoting an exchange between different approaches and points of views.
Submission 497
Post-Error Slowing Is Modulated by Emotional Words - Evidence for Affective Control Theories
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Felix Cramer
Felix CramerDavid Dignath
University of Tübingen, Germany
Few things are as instantly frustrating as realizing one made a mistake. Yet, it may be precisely this uncomfortable feeling what pushes us to pay attention, adjust, and do better next time. Affective theories of control argue that the negative or arousing quality of errors serves as feedback signal to respond with more caution. To directly test this idea, we combined a temporal flanker task with emotional words that systematically varied in affective context. We found that both arousal (emotional versus neutral) and valence (negative versus positive) of the emotional words modulate behavior following errors, consistent across a pre-registered experiment (N = 60) and a mega-analysis pooling this dataset with data from five other experiments employing a similar design (N = 352). Specifically, results showed increased post-error slowing following negative relative to positive words, supporting the idea that negative affect amplifies the aversive signal of errors. Results also indicated greater post-error slowing following high compared to low arousing words, but this effect declined with time-on-task, suggesting that the error-related orienting response habituates over time. Overall, the findings provide evidence for a functional integration of emotions and control, and we discuss potential mechanisms that may account for this relationship.