Cognitive control enables individuals to rapidly adapt to changing task demands. To investigate error-driven adjustments in cognitive control, in one study we have considered performance changes in posterror trials, when participants performed a visual search task requiring detection of angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions in crowds of faces. Whereas current models always predict a slowing down of performance after an error, we found the opposite result: when participants failed to detect the presence of a threatening face, in the following trial they were more efficient: their RTs tended to be faster with no accuracy cost. The impact of threat-detection failure on cognitive control, as revealed by the present study, suggests that posterror adjustments should be understood as the product of domain-specific mechanisms that are strongly influenced by affective information, rather than as the effect of a general-purpose error-monitoring system.
Corrado Caudek
Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology
Investigating cognitive processes and individual differences.