AUTHOR=Masina Fabio , Di Rosa Elisa , Mapelli Daniela
TITLE=Intra-Individual Variability of Error Awareness and Post-error Slowing in Three Different Age-Groups
JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology
VOLUME=9
YEAR=2018
URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00902
DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00902
ISSN=1664-1078
ABSTRACT=Background: Error awareness (EA) and post-error slowing (PES) are two crucial components of an adequate performance monitoring because, respectively, they allow being aware of an error and triggering performance adjustments following unexpected events.
Objective: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the ontogenetic trajectories of EA and PES, as well as to examine how EA and PES interact with each other.
Methods: The performance of three groups of participants (children, younger, and older adults) in a modified version of the Error Awareness task (EAT; Hester et al., 2005) was compared. In particular, in this study not only variations of the average performance were examined, but also intra-individual variability (IIV), considered in terms of variations of SD and ex-Gaussian parameters (mu, sigma, and tau).
Results: Two distinct ontogenetic trajectories of EA and PES were observed. Regarding EA, we observe a U-shaped curve that describes an increase of the process from childhood to early adulthood and a progressive reduction advancing age in late adulthood. Furthermore, a greater IIV in older adults indicated a susceptibility of EA to the aging process. The ontogenetic trajectory of PES seems substantially different from the trajectory that describes EA since in PES we do not observe age-related differences.
Conclusion: These results suggest that EA and PES are two independent processes. Furthermore, it appears that EA and PES are differently prone to short-term fluctuations in performance across the lifespan. While EA presents an increase in IIV in aging, PES seems to be immune to these changes.