Nonhuman primates exhibit error type-dependent post-error slowing across modalities
Mistakes make up our daily lives. Once a mistake has been committed, it is common to pause before you continue. This slowing is called post-error slowing (PES). Although several theories have been proposed to account for PES in humans, findings across cognitive tasks show variation in how PES occurs, and it is unclear how this phenomenon may translate across modalities to a key model organism of…
Mistakes are an inevitable part of daily life. Following an error, there is a tendency to pause before proceeding further. This pause, known as post-error slowing (PES), has been explored in various cognitive tasks, though the factors influencing PES vary across tasks, and its application to animals remains unclear. To assess whether nonhuman primates exhibit PES, researchers tested three rhesus macaque monkeys in sequential decision-making tasks, utilizing either eye tracking or touch screen responses.
The findings reveal that monkeys demonstrate non-adaptive, error type-dependent PES across different modalities. The task structure and context further modulate PES in the eye tracking task, while no modality enhances task performance following PES. These results suggest that PES in monkeys is a blend of cognitive and non-cognitive responses to errors, influenced by task structures like error type and task context.
The researchers conclude that the adaptability of monkey PES is comparable to that of humans, reinforcing the significance of monkeys as a translational model for understanding the mechanisms of PES.
Written by urgent.news from bioRxiv's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
