Error Cancellation During Early Task Performance

Abstract: Models of performance monitoring hold that following an error, the early postresponse period is devoted primarily to error detection rather than mitigation. However, recent evidence shows that erroneous actions can be terminated within ∼100 ms of their initiation. Prior demonstrations of such error cancellation are based on rapid action slips that emerge in highly over-learned tasks, leaving open the question whether error cancellation generalizes to other types of errors. Here, we probed for the generality of the error cancellation effect by studying medium-speed errors that arise from the incorrect application of a mapping rule in the early stages of implementing a novel instruction. Reanalyses of three publicly available datasets show that error cancellation indeed extends to such errors. Swift error cancellation, therefore, is a remarkably general and automatic component of human performance monitoring.