Posterror speeding after threat-detection failure.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
; 41(2): 324-41, 2015 Apr.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-25665085
ABSTRACT
Cognitive control enables individuals to rapidly adapt to changing task demands. To investigate error-driven adjustments in cognitive control, we considered performance changes in posterror trials, when participants performed a visual search task requiring detection of angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions in crowds of faces. We hypothesized that the failure to detect a potential threat (angry face) would prompt a different posterror adjustment than the failure to detect a nonthreatening target (happy or neutral face). Indeed, in 3 sets of experiments, we found evidence of posterror speeding, in the first case, and of posterror slowing, in the second case. Previous results indicate that a threatening stimulus can improve the efficiency of visual search. The results of the present study show that a similar effect can also be observed when participants fail to detect a threat. The impact of threat-detection failure on cognitive control, as revealed by the present study, suggests that posterror adjustments should be understood as the product of domain-specific mechanisms that are strongly influenced by affective information, rather than as the effect of a general-purpose error-monitoring system.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Perceptual Defense
/
Reaction Time
/
Emotional Adjustment
/
Facial Recognition
Type of study:
Diagnostic_studies
Limits:
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
Year:
2015
Document type:
Article