Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

On the Reliability and Factor Structure of Sustained Post-Error Slowing

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Clifford Hauenstein¹ (chauens2@jh.edu), Eunbee Kim², Alexis Phillips¹, Alana Montanez¹, Derek Smith¹; ¹1Division of Cognitive Neurology/Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, ²School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology

Post-error slowing (PES) is the widely observed tendency to slow down after error commission. Evidence suggests that the magnitude of PES is correlated across tasks, implying that PES reflects a domain general process. However, the extant research has given less attention to PES sustained across multiple trials and all but neglected cross-task correlations in sustained PES. Recent experimental research provides evidence demonstrating that PES may emerge from different processes, depending on the elapsed time since error commission. Reanalysis of published data reveals that, unlike the initial PES, sustained PES did not correlate between three different cognitive control tasks. However, these diminished correlation estimates for sustained PES may be driven by relative unreliability in sustained PES. To determine if the diminished cross-task correlations observed for sustained PES are explained by a true difference in processing or merely attenuated reliability, we employed a multi-level model that accurately distinguishes within-subject variability from between-subjects variability. Although within-subject variability was smaller for sustained PES (relative to initial PES) the between-subjects variability in sustained PES was drastically smaller (relative to initial PES). Thus, sustained PES as an individual difference measure is less reliable than initial PES, principally due to less variability between persons. As part of this project, we are also developing a multi-level structural equation model to evaluate the corrected cross-task correlational structure of PES (correlations that account for the relative unreliability of sustained PES measures).

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control