Error awareness and post-error slowing: The effect of manipulating trial intervals

Post-error slowing is often considered to be an error-related process that relies upon conscious error recognition, however evidence regarding this relationship is mixed. These inconsistent findings may be explained by the influence of task demands on post-error slowing. The current set of experiments aimed to investigate the role of error awareness in post-error slowing in an error awareness task with up to three dynamic conditions. In each condition, we manipulated the interval between lure trials (infrequent trials that require a different response to target trials) such that they were presented either randomly (standard condition), closely spaced (proximal condition) or widely spaced (distal condition) among target trials. This design attempted to clarify if the relationship between error awareness and post-error slowing is contingent upon task constraints such as trial timing and whether it persists over several trials. Our experiments demonstrate that under dynamic lure interval conditions, error awareness and post-error slowing are only weakly related. Further, post-error slowing was greatest in the standard condition which randomly presented lure trials, while accuracy was lowest in this condition across both experiments. Exclusion of the first post-error trial from both experiments eliminated all effects, indicating that there were only transient differences in post-error reaction time adjustments that were exclusive to the first post-error trial. Our findings thus align with non-functional accounts of post-error slowing and support the notion that post-error slowing and cognitive control can be separate processes that are largely not dependent on error awareness.