News
Oops!... I did it again (Error Awareness and Executive Function)
By Colin Drexler, PhD Student
Oops!... I did it again. Everyone knows how it feels to instantly realize that you just made a mistake. Let’s say you’re driving down the road on your way to a friend’s house, but then you suddenly notice that you’re actually halfway to work, headed in the completely wrong direction. Or pretend you’re an elementary school child on their way to school, and you unexpectedly remember that you forgot to complete your math homework the night before. That rush of feeling, that surge of awareness that what you did was wrong and what you should have done instead, is unmistakable. What happens next may differ across individuals. Some people may turn their thoughts toward solutions to the problem, calculating a new driving route or pulling out the math homework to quickly finish it on the school bus. Others may get stuck ruminating about their mistakes, internally punishing themselves and heading down the rabbit hole of anxiety.
In a new study out of the DSCN Lab, we tested what happens in children’s brains when they notice their own mistakes on an executive function task. We were looking for the “Error-Related Negativity” or “ERN”, and it’s the brain’s “Oops response”. Within 100 milliseconds of making an error, frontocentral regions of the brain (the top of your forehead around the hairline) sent a negatively charged electrical signal to other brain regions alerting them to the error. Sometimes this signal could go to motor regions of the brain, telling them to initiate a new action. The ERN could also send this signal to prefrontal regions of the brain involved in executive function, which would help calculate a new plan of action. Or, for some individuals, the ERN could cascade into rumination and anxiety about the mistake. A common brain response is called “Error Positivity,” or “Pe”, which is a positively charged electrical response found in posterior/central regions of the brain (right around the bald spot), occurring around 200-500 milliseconds after the error is made. The Pe is likely to be related to awareness of the error and subsequent cognitive processing about the error, while the ERN is likely to be an automatic response that occurs before you’re even aware the mistake was made.
In our study, we had a few different conditions for our child participants, who were aged 7 to 9-years-old. While wearing an EEG cap (pictured), some children completed the Dimensional Change Card Sort task like normal, completing trial after trial, sorting cards into two boxes either by their color or their shape. However, other children also answered metacognitive questions about the task. Every couple of sorting questions, they were prompted to respond to “Did you answer the last one right?” or “Do you want to include the last one in your final score?”. Results showed that children who did NOT answer these metacognitive questions showed a larger ERN response to errors. This indicates that the act of periodically reflecting on your own performance precludes the need for the brain to send out an “Oops response”—you’re already paying attention to your performance in live-time, you already know that you made a mistake, and the rest of your brain doesn’t even need to be alerted. We also found that, regardless of which condition they were in, children with higher self- and parent-reported anxiety showed a larger Pe response to errors, which indicates that anxious children were likely ruminating about their errors to a greater degree, thereby punishing themselves for their mistakes instead of efficiently moving on to the next question.
These results can teach us a lot about how to encourage children to use their executive function skills in the real world. It’s important to teach children to go through life paying attention to their own thoughts and behaviors in terms of their long-term goals, exercising their executive function skills. But, there is a fine line between doing so proactively and effectively, and doing so reactively and unproductively. Children who answered metacognitive questions about their performance entered a proactive, efficient brain-state, one that didn’t need to send out an Oops response to alert itself about mistakes. Meanwhile, anxious children were in a reactive, ineffective brain-state, one that spent too much time continuing to think about their mistakes that had already happened.