The Alerting Function Of Attention Network Modulate Post-Error Adaptions

Post-error adaptation refers to a series of adjustments to the purpose of reducing the following error. In the course of an individual’s living of growing-up and development, post-error adaptation play an important role. The study to post error adaptation not only help us to understand the behavior pattern and reaction mechanism when we realize that we have just committed an error, but also be helpful to understand the mechanism of the generation and formation about human’s adaptive behavior. Research shows that there are at least three types of behavioral post-error adjustments, that is, post-error slowing(PES), post-error improvement in accuracy(PIA), and post-error reduction of interference(PERI). Many research which focus on error processing shows that post error adaptation are quite stable(especially PES and PIA). Several theoretical explanations which from different perspective, such as cognitive control, attentional orienting, response inhibition, or reinforcement learning, are presented to account post error adaptation. Cognitive control theory suggests that post-error adaptation reflects the attentional enhancement to target stimulus. Orienting theory views error response as an unexpected, infrequently events, and which suggests that PES reflects an orienting response to these infrequently events. Response inhibitory hypothesis suggests that the commission of an error leads to an increase in response suppression, which is to improve the behavioral performances in post-error trials. However, reinforcement learning theory explains that error as an a kind of learning signal which encourage individuals to strengthen the correct stimulus response connection.However, those explanations have neglected an important factor which affect the post error adaptation, namely, the alerting function of the attention network. altering play an fundamental role in maintaining cognitive function, and its main function is to maintain a certain degree of readiness or arousal state to receive information input. An effective error adaptation requires us to capture the error signal as quickly as possible, and them make an adjustments in post-error trials.However, both the acquisition of error signal and the adjustment of error response require subjects to maintain a certain level of readiness and arousal level. Therefore, we speculates that alerting play an fundamental role in modulating post-error adaptation. Unfortunately, throughout the literature, we have not found a direct study of the relationship between alerting and post error adaptation.Therefore, in order to explore the role of alerting in post-error adaptation,which will help us to understand the generating mechanism of the post error adaptation more deeply. In the present study,we first use attention network test(ANT) to investigate the alerting level of all subjects,Simultaneously, We examine the effectiveness of the attention network test. Secondly, we tested the effect of post-error adaptation in Eriksen-Flanker task, after that, we analyses the relationships between PES and PIA. Finally, by comparing the behavior performance of subjects which are divided into different groups according to alerting level, we directly explore the relationship between alerting functions and post error adaptation.In the present study, Firstly, we found that there was no obvious correlation among the alerting,orienting and executive control network of attention system; secondly, we observed significant post-error slowing and post-error improvement in accuracy, but we did not found any significant variation in interference effects between post-error and post-correct trials. It is notable that we did not observed any significant correlation between PES and PIA. Finally, the correlation analysis between alerting level and post-error adaptation shows that alerting level was significantly correlated with post error slowing, and there was a marginal significance correlation between alerting and PIA. The repeated measure variance analysis between alerting level(high alerting group,low alerting group) and the correctness of previous trials(previous-correct, previous-error) shows that there was significant PES and PIA in both alerting group, but we only found significant difference in PES between high alerting group and low alerting group.Integrating the above results and related research results, this study draws the following conclusions: Firstly, ANT Produces reliable subject estimates of alerting, orienting and executive attention function. Alerting, orienting, and executive control are relatively independent from each other. Secondly, post-error adaptation has a certain stability in flanker task(especially PES and PIA).in addition, since there was no collections between PES and PIA, they might represent different processes. Finally, the alerting function of attention network modulate post-error adaptation, but the level of alerting only affects PES, and does not affects PIA. We assume that PES only reflects the speed of error adaptation. It does not involve the specific cognitive processes. However, PIA reflects the effect of error adaptation, which is driven strongly by purpose and required to engage more complex cognitive process. Alerting as a kind of diffuse arousal level which can’t regulate the specific cognitive process, only affect the speed of error adaptation. However, Speed up the adaptation is not necessarily lead to the improvement of the adaptation effect.