AUTHOR=Van der Borght Liesbet , Desmet Charlotte , Notebaert Wim 

TITLE=Strategy Changes After Errors Improve Performance

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=6

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02051

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02051

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>The observation that performance does not improve following errors contradicts the traditional view on error monitoring (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B11">Fiehler et al., 2005</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B23">Núñez Castellar et al., 2010</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B22">Notebaert and Verguts, 2011</xref>). However, recent findings suggest that typical laboratory tasks provided us with a narrow window on error monitoring (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B15">Jentzsch and Dudschig, 2009</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B9">Desmet et al., 2012</xref>). In this study we investigated strategy-use after errors in a mental arithmetic task. In line with our hypothesis, this more complex task did show increased performance after errors. More specifically, switching to a different strategy after an error resulted in improved performance, while repeating the same strategy resulted in worse performance. These results show that in more ecological valid tasks, post-error behavioral improvement can be observed.</p>