Expectations can lead to prediction errors of varying degrees depending on the extent to which the information encountered in the environment conforms with prior knowledge. While there is strong evidence on the computationally specific effects of such prediction errors on learning, relatively less evidence is available regarding their effects on…

Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people…

Purpose: A growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to the development of speech sound disorder (SSD). However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech perception deficits in this population. The primary aim of this study was to compare the neural…

Although electrophysiological (electroencephalography) measures of executive functions (e.g. error monitoring) have been used to predict academic achievement in typically developing children, work investigating a link between error monitoring and academic skills in children with autism spectrum disorder is limited. In this study, we employed…

Cognitive flexibility refers to various processes which enable behaviors to be modified on the basis of a change in the contingencies between stimuli or responses and their associated outcomes. Reversal learning is a form of cognitive flexibility which measures the ability to adjust responding based on a switch in the stimulus--outcome…

The development of error monitoring is central to learning and academic achievement. However, few studies exist on the neural correlates of children's error monitoring, and no studies have examined its susceptibility to educational influences. Pedagogical methods differ on how they teach children to learn from errors. Here, 32 students (aged 8-12…

Neuroscience suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is responsible for conflict monitoring and the detection of errors in cognitive tasks, thereby contributing to the implementation of attentional control. Though individual differences in frontally mediated goal maintenance have clearly been shown to influence outward behavior in…

Caffeine has become the most prevalently consumed psychostimulant in the world, but its influences on daily real-world functioning are relatively unknown. The present work investigated the effects of caffeine (0 mg, 100 mg, 200 mg, 400 mg) on a commonplace language task that required readers to identify and correct 4 error types in extended…

Patients with right hemisphere lesions often omit or misread words on the left side of a text or the initial letters of single words, a phenomenon termed neglect dyslexia (ND). Omissions of words on the contralesional side of the page are considered as egocentric or space-based errors, whereas misread words can be viewed as a type of…

Errors generate typical brain responses, characterized by two successive event-related potentials (ERP) following incorrect action: the error-related negativity (ERN) and the positivity error (Pe). However, it is unclear whether these error-related responses are sensitive to the magnitude of the error, or instead show all-or-none effects. We…

Deficits in cognitive control are implicated in cocaine dependence. Previously, combining functional magnetic resonance imaging and a stop signal task, we demonstrated altered cognitive control in cocaine-dependent individuals. However, the clinical implications of these cross-sectional findings and, in particular, whether the changes were…

Previous studies on performance monitoring repeatedly found attenuated error-related negativities (Ne/ERN) in elderly, while findings for the correct-related negativity (Nc/CRN) are inconsistent. The present study aimed at clarifying inconsistent Nc/CRN results in elderly. Therefore, a refined design was employed to control for potential…

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and…

When subjects are given the balls-and-boxes problem-solving task (Kotovsky & Simon, 1990), they move rapidly towards the goal after an extended exploratory phase, despite having no awareness of how to solve the task. We investigated possible non-conscious learning mechanisms by giving subjects three runs of the task while recording ERPs. Subjects…

In this study, we attempted to clarify whether distractibility in ADHD might arise from increased sensory-driven interference or from inefficient top-down control. We employed an attentional filtering paradigm in which discrimination difficulty and distractor salience (amount of image "graying") were parametrically manipulated. Increased…