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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 23, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
05:22

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

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

Martin E Maier1, Giuseppe di Pellegrino, Marco Steinhauser

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. martinernst.maier@unibo.it

Psychophysiology
|April 25, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

The study found that the error-related negativity (ERN) reflects the significance of errors, not just their expectancy. Larger ERNs were observed for errors with greater impact on task goals, supporting the error significance account.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Electrophysiology
  • Human Performance Monitoring

Background:

  • The error-related negativity (ERN) is a key electrophysiological marker associated with performance monitoring.
  • Existing theories propose ERN reflects either error expectancy or error significance for task goals.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the ERN is primarily driven by the expectancy of making errors or their significance.
  • To differentiate between the error expectancy and error significance accounts of ERN generation.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a flanker task with varying flanker sizes to manipulate error expectancy and significance.
  • Employed a multinomial model to analyze the nature and significance of errors.
  • Measured the error-related negativity (ERN) using electrophysiological recordings.

Main Results:

  • Larger flankers increased the occurrence of flanker errors, enhancing both error expectancy and significance.
  • Multinomial modeling confirmed these flanker errors represented significant attention-related errors.
  • The ERN was significantly larger for flanker errors occurring with large flankers.

Conclusions:

  • The findings support the error significance account, indicating ERN amplitude is modulated by an error's importance to the task.
  • This research clarifies the functional role of the ERN in cognitive control and performance monitoring.