To err is autonomic: Error‐related brain potentials, ANS activity, and post‐error compensatory behavior

Active cocaine abusers have a diminished neural response to errors, particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex thought critical to error processing. The inability to detect, or adjust performance following errors has been linked to clinical symptoms including the loss of insight and perseverative behavior. We investigated the cognitive implications of this diminished error-related activity, using response inhibition tasks that required error awareness and performance adaptation. Twenty-one active cocaine users (six female subjects, mean age ¼ 40.3) and 22 non-drug using adults (six female subjects, mean ¼ 39.9) participated. The results indicated that cocaine users consistently demonstrated poorer inhibitory control, a deficit accompanied by reduced awareness of errors. Adaptation of post-error reaction times did not differ between groups, although a different measure of adaptive behavior: exerting inhibitory control on the trial immediately after failing to inhibit, was significantly poorer in the cocaine using sample. In summary, cocaine users demonstrated a diminished capacity for monitoring their behavior, but were able to perform post-error adjustment to processes not already suffering an underlying deficit. These difficulties are consistent with previous reports of cocaine-related hypoactivity in the neural system underlying cognitive control, and highlight the potential for cognitive dysfunction to manifest as behavioral deficits that likely contribute to the maintenance of drug dependence.

The Error-Related Negativity (ERN) is a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that is associated with action monitoring and error detection. The present study addressed the question whether or not an ERN occurs after verbal error detection, e.g., during phoneme monitoring. We obtained an ERN following verbal errors which showed a typical decrease in amplitude under severe time pressure. This result demonstrates that the functioning of the verbal self-monitoring system is comparable to other performance monitoring, such as action monitoring. Furthermore, we found that participants made more errors in phoneme monitoring under time pressure than in a control condition. This may suggest that time pressure decreases the amount of resources available to a capacity-limited self-monitor thereby leading to more errors. IntroductionError monitoring is an important executive function, which helps to adapt, anticipate, learn, correct, and mend the consequences of actions. The neural basis of error monitoring has become a key issue in cognitive neuroscience due to its importance to the aforementioned cognitive skills. A better understanding of its working may offer new insights into the dysfunctions of self-monitoring seen in a range of clinical conditions such as schizophrenia , opiate addicts (Forman et al., 2004), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Gehring et al., 2000). Progress in identifying the functional characteristics of the error monitoring system has been mainly achieved through the study of an electrophysiological index thought to be associated with error processing, i.e., Error-Related Negativity (ERN; Falkenstein et al., 1991;Gehring et al., 1993). The ERN is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) that has a fronto-central scalp distribution and peaks about 80 ms after an overt incorrect response (Bernstein et al., 1995;Holroyd and Yeung, 2003;Scheffers et al., 1996). The early onset latency of the ERN with respect to the incorrect response is suggestive of an error monitoring system. The generation of the ERN has been localized in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Dehaene et al., 1994;Holroyd and Coles, 2002). Several hypotheses of performance monitoring have been proposed to account for the ERN, for instance, the mismatch hypothesis put forward by Falkenstein et al. (1991), the response conflict hypothesis proposed by Carter et al. (1998), and the reinforcement learning theory by Holroyd and Coles (2002).The mismatch hypothesis considers the ERN as the result of a mismatch between the intended and the actual response execution (Bernstein et al., 1995). This hypothesis assumes a comparison between the internal representation of the intended correct response, arising from ongoing stimulus processing, and the internal representation of the actual

BackgroundActions of others may have immediate consequences for oneself. We probed the neural responses associated with the observation of another person's action using event-related potentials in a modified gambling task. In this task a "performer" bet either a higher or lower number and could win or lose this amount. Three different groups of "observers" were also studied. The first (neutral) group simply observed the performer's action, which had no consequences for the observers. In the second (parallel) group, wins/losses of the performer were paralleled by similar wins and losses by the observer. In the third (reverse) group, wins of the performer led to a loss of the observer and vice versa.ResultsERPs of the performers showed a mediofrontal feedback related negativity (FRN) to losses. The neutral and parallel observer groups did similarly show an FRN response to the performer's losses with a topography indistinguishable from that seen in the performers. In the reverse group, however, the FRN occurred for wins of the performer which translated to losses for the observer.ConclusionsTaking into account previous experiments, we suggest that the FRN response in observers is driven by two evaluative processes (a) related to the benefit/loss for oneself and (b) related to the benefit/loss of another person.