Enhanced error‐related negativity on flanker errors : Error expectancy or error significance?

Abstract

The present study investigated whether the error‐related negativity, an electrophysiological marker for performance monitoring, reflects (1) the expectancy of errors, or (2) the significance of errors for the current task goal. In the first case, a larger error‐related negativity is predicted for less expected errors, whereas in the second case, a larger error‐related negativity is predicted for errors with greater significance. To test these predictions, we varied flanker size in a flanker task. With large flankers, more errors occurred by executing the response associated with the flankers (flanker errors) leading to a greater expectancy of flanker errors. As revealed by a multinomial model, these additional flanker errors represented highly significant attention errors, leading to an increased error significance. The error‐related negativity was larger for flanker errors with large flankers, which supports the error significance account.