Joint effects of sensory feedback and interoceptive awareness on conscious error detection: Evidence from event related brain potentials

Abstract

Error awareness has been argued to depend on sensory feedback and interoceptive awareness (IA) (Ullsperger et al., 2010). We recorded EEG while participants performed a speeded Go/No-Go task in which they signaled error commission. Visibility of the effector was manipulated, while IA was measured with a heartbeat perception task. The late Pe was larger for aware than unaware errors. The ERN was also found to be modulated by error awareness, but only when the hand was visible, suggesting that its sensitivity to error awareness depends on the availability of visual sensory feedback. Only when the response hand was visible, the late Pe amplitude to aware errors correlated with IA, suggesting that sensory feedback and IA synergistically contribute to the emergence of error awareness. These findings underscore the idea that several sources of information accumulate in time following action execution in order to enable errors to break through and reach awareness.

Relevance and uncertainty jointly influence reward anticipation at the level of the SPN ERP component

“…A modified version of a well-validated speeded Go/NoGo task (see Pourtois, 2010, 2012;Godefroid et al, 2016;Koban et al, 2012;Paul et al, 2017;Pourtois, 2011;Severo et al, 2017;Vocat et al, 2008) was used in the current study (see Figure 1 A for trial structure). Each trial started with the presentation of a black fixation cross lasting for 1000 ms. Then, a black arrow ('cue'), either oriented up or down, was presented.…”

“…To this aim, we devised a factorial design where we could thoroughly explore the interplay of relevance with uncertainty during reward anticipation at the SPN level, and we eventually assessed whether these two variables showed mainly independent effects, or rather a synergistic one during this process (see Figure 1 A). To achieve this, we extracted and analyzed the SPN component from an existing ERP study by Walentowska et al (2016), in which a speeded Go/NoGo task was used (previously validated extensively across different ERP studies, Pourtois, 2010, 2012;Godefroid et al, 2016;Koban et al, 2012;Paul et al, 2017;Pourtois, 2011;Severo et al, 2017;Vocat et al, 2008). In this previous study, both the response-locked (CRN), and stimulus/feedback-locked (FRN and P3) components were carefully analyzed and reported, but not the SPN.…”

Interoceptive awareness in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

“…IA has been shown to play a key role in the processing and regulation of emotions, with higher IA being associated with more intense feelings during emotion processing and higher activation of underlying brain regions, and better emotion regulation skills [ 16 , 17 ]. IA also contributes to other cognitive functions required for effective self-regulation such as selective attention, decision-making [ 18 ], memory [ 19 ], and error processing [ 20 – 22 ]. All these cognitive functions as well as emotion regulation have been reported to be disturbed in ADHD [ 23 – 28 ].…”

“…IA was objectively measured by means of a well-validated heartbeat perception task [ 10 , 15 , 16 ], the Mental Tracking Method [ 41 ], in which participants are instructed to silently monitor their own cardiac activity during three separate intervals. This task is well-validated and the most frequently used task to assess interoceptive ability, which has been successfully applied in several research domains [ 10 , 16 , 18 , 22 ]. Previous research has shown that this task is sensitive to interindividual differences in IA, and sensitive enough to uncover differences in IA in other neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., autism spectrum disorder (ASD), tic disorder) [ 31 , 32 ].…”

Invariance and variability in interaction error-related potentials and their consequences for classification

“…This in turn suggests that the different ErrP types are manifestations of similar performance monitoring systems [22][23][24][25]. Furthermore, errors, and more specifically, conscious errors, are accompanied by changes in autonomic activity, like heart rate deceleration, increase in pupil size, larger skin conductance responses and increased amygdala activity [15].…”