Error cancellation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Pfister
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560785669

Every human action bears the risk of erring. Errors are costly as they disrupt the current flow of activities and they can have serious future consequences. Detecting errors as quickly as possible is therefore necessary to initiate suitable countermeasures and to adjust cognitive processing to avoid further slipping. But when do humans begin to realize that their actions slip, and how long does it take to instill effective countermeasures? Recent observations indicate that this process is remarkably fast – with experimental findings suggesting that attempts to cancel an erroneous action emerge in the blink of an eye, within only 100 milliseconds after error commission. This phenomenon of “error cancellation” is a unique window on adaptive mechanisms of cognitive control and performance monitoring but it remains poorly understood at present. Accordingly, no theory of such processes has been proposed, not to mention formal models. Studying error cancellation processes further comes with considerable applied value for automated error detection in activities such as typing. We will therefore use modern behavioural and neurophysiological approaches to understand the mechanics of error cancellation. Evidence gathered in the process will be used to establish precise computational models of when and how erroneous actions are counteracted as well as their neurophysiological signatures. Such models will represent a considerable advance in psychological theorizing by moving from models of how behaviour arises to models that capture the termination of behaviour.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Denis Cousineau; Professorin Dr. Claudia Danielmeier; Professor Dr. Jan Derrfuß