Error cancellation

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error's consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here, we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feeding back directly onto ongoing motor activity, thus cancelling erroneous movements immediately. We tested this prediction of immediate auto-correction by analysing how the force of correct and erroneous keypress actions evolves over time while controlling for cognitive and biomechanical constraints relating to response time and the peak force of a movement. We conclude that the force profiles are indicative of active cancellation by showing indications of shorter response durations for errors already within the first 100 ms, i.e. between the onset and the peak of the response, a timescale that has previously been related solely to error detection. This effect increased in a late phase of responding, i.e. after response force peaked until its offset, further corroborating that it indeed reflects cancellation efforts instead of consequences of planning or initiating the error.