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What Happens After an Error?

A ubiquitous finding in cognitive science across a wide variety of tasks is that humans tend to slow down after making an error. The dominant account of this post error slowing is that people engage in adaptive control and are simply more cautious after an error. However, this explanation is challenged by the fact that, although people are slower, accuracy typically does not improve following an error. Errors negatively impact cognitive processing, but characterizing the nature of error-based impairments has been a challenge in standard paradigms. Here, we adopt a recently developed experimental approach to uncover the time course of stimulus-response processing following an error by exerting tight control over the timing of responses. This method allows us to apply a computational model of response preparation that allows us to estimate the latency of cognitive processing underlying responses. In a four alternative forced-choice task with arbitrary stimulus-response mappings, we find that human participants are less accurate after an error even when given up to two seconds to make a response. Our modeling results ruled out the possibility that errors lead to a subsequent slowing of the cognitive processing underlying responses. Instead, we found that the “efficacy” of cognitive processing in producing an intended response is impaired following errors as people commit more perseverative slips of action regardless of when a response is made. These results suggest that prior observations of post-error slowing may be an adaptive response to impaired cognitive processing rather than a strategic shift in the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Significance Statement What happens after we make a mistake? It has long been established that human behavior changes after committing an error, but it has been surprisingly hard to establish how our mental processing is affected. By forcing people to respond at predetermined times, we uncover the time-course of how we go from a stimulus to a response. We find that errors do not affect the timing or the variability of stimulus-response processing. Instead, errors lead people to be more likely to immediately slip up and repeat their past mistakes, even when given ample time to recover. Our results that even though people may slow down to take their time to get it right, they are fundamentally less effective after making an error.