The alertness level influences post-error adjustments

Post-error adjustment indicates that individuals execute a chain of adjustments after committing errors to reduce the likelihood of repeating an error, which is important for our survival and evolution. It includes post-error slowing (PES), post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA), and post-error reduction of interference (PERI) three types. However, there are still intensive disputes about the generation mechanisms of the post-error adjustment. The cognitive control account suggests that errors are associated with the error monitoring and a subsequent intensification of top-down control. After committing an error, the error signal will initiate cognitive control mechanisms to improve subsequent performance by activating the anterior cingulate cortex. In this case, increased cognitive control enables flexible recruitment of attentional resources to the goal-related dimension in the subsequent task. However, the orienting account assumes that the infrequent events can easily capture the attentional resources, and thus participants need to take more time to reorient the subsequent task. The remaining resources will be insufficient to perform effectively the subsequent task, behaving as decreased post-error accuracy. Therefore, how the attention influences the post-error adjustment remains unclear. To address the above issue, we first employed an attention network test (ANT) to evaluate the attention function of each participant. The ANT task was developed to measure the efficiency of the attentional networks including alerting, orienting and executive control through a simple cue (asterisk) and arrow Flanker task. There were four cue conditions: no cue, center cue, double cue, and spatial cue. In the no cue condition, only the fixation cross was presented in the center of the screen. In the center cue condition, an asterisk was presented in the center of the screen. In the double cue and spatial cue conditions, the fixation cross was always presented in the center of the screen. However, for the double cue condition, two asterisks were presented simultaneously at two possible target positions; for the spatial cue condition, an asterisk was presented at the target position. Additionally, the efficiency of alerting was defined as RT no cue – RT double cue , the efficiency of orienting was defined as RT center cue – RT spatial cue , and the efficiency of executive control was defined as RT incongruent – RT congruent . Then, we employed a letter Flanker task to examine the participants’ performance in the post-error trials. PES was calculated by the RT of correct trials following errors minus the RT of correct trials following correct responses. PIA was calculated by the accuracy following errors minus the accuracy following correct response. And PERI was calculated by the interference magnitude ( RT incongruent – RT congruent ) following correct responses minus the interference magnitude following errors. To investigate which function of the attentional network influences the post-error adjustment, we correlated the scores of alerting, orienting and executive control with PES, PIA, and PERI, respectively. Finally, based on the correlation result, we grouped the participants as high altering level group (32% participants) and low alerting level group (32% participants) to further examine the individual difference in the post-error adjustment. As a result, we found that only the alerting score was negatively correlated with PES and PIA. Moreover, in the individual difference analysis, we found that the PES was only observed in the low alerting level group, but this effect was absent in the high alerting level group. For the PIA, there was no significant difference between two groups. These results may suggest that the alerting function plays an important role in the post-error adjustments, especially for the PES. High alerting level group has an advantage on enhanced alertness; they accordingly complete post-error adjustment with high efficiency.