Dynamic modulation of the processing of unpredicted technical errors by the posterior cingulate and the default mode...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Psychology

Background:

• Information technologies (IT) are ubiquitous, but unexpected system errors can cause technostress.
• The behavioral and neural responses to dynamic IT errors are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how individuals behaviorally and neurally respond to unexpected system runtime errors during IT interaction.
• To elucidate the brain mechanisms underlying responses to different types of IT errors.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study 15 young adults.
• Participants solved arithmetic problems of varying difficulty (easy, medium, hard) while experiencing unexpected problem errors (defective problem display) and feedback errors (erroneous feedback).

Main Results:

• Problem errors enhanced problem-solving performance on difficult tasks initially.
• Feedback errors negatively impacted performance.
• Behavioral changes correlated with brain activation in the posterior cingulate and default mode network (including posterior cingulate cortex, mPFC, retrosplenial cortex, parahippocampal gyrus).

Conclusions:

• The posterior cingulate plays a regulatory role in coping with unexpected IT errors.
• The default mode network is involved in dynamic environmental changes and error processing.
• Understanding these neural mechanisms can inform the design of more resilient IT systems.