Towards an ecological approach to understanding the neurophysiological bases of human error-monitoring
To err is certainly human. Detect and correct our errors are fundamental during our interaction with the outside world. Therefore, understanding the nature of the brain mechanisms involved in the flexible evaluation of human action and the adaptive changes that follow behavioral imperceptions is a b...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2014 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/283999 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/283999 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Neurofisiologia Neurofisiología Neurophysiology Cognició Cognición Cognition Ciències de la Salut 159.9 |
| Sumario: | To err is certainly human. Detect and correct our errors are fundamental during our interaction with the outside world. Therefore, understanding the nature of the brain mechanisms involved in the flexible evaluation of human action and the adaptive changes that follow behavioral imperceptions is a basic goal of modern cognitive neuroscience. The study of the brain mechanisms of error-monitoring has advanced enormously during the last two decades, mostly due to the discovery of specific electrophysiological signals and neural networks that are sensitive to error commission, but also to conflicting, unexpected and undesired events, all requiring the implementation of cognitive control processes in order to optimize performance. Neuroimaging studies, for instance, have associated error-monitoring with the activity of a widespread network of brain regions, wherein the medial prefrontal cortex is a key neural hub for regulative aspects of action monitoring and cognitive control. Electrophysiological studies have also identified a family of negative ERP signals in medial-frontal regions which appear to be mainly orchestrated by neural oscillatory theta activity. This field has provided the grounding for a very interesting research program regarding high-order cognitive control, decision-making and learning processes. It is worth mentioning, though, that most of this research program has been mainly focus on the examination of action slips in fairly simple force-choice reaction time paradigms. In these contexts errors reflect no deliberated actions caused by perceptual or attentional lapses. However, in real life situations error forms are so widespread and its causes so diverse that a crucial challenge for cognitive neuroscientists concerns the development of methods and paradigms that allow the study of the neural bases of error-monitoring in broad ecological contexts that reproduce the complexity of everyday life situations in which humans are likely to commit errors. The present dissertation aims at providing new alternatives and contributions regarding this issue by addressing novel questions, developing new toolkits and bringing new ideas to study well described neural dynamics of error-monitoring in more extended and ecological contexts in which humans interact. Throughout this research I have combined electrophysiological tools, fundamentally event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency analysis, with novel experimental paradigms in order to provide answers to questions that all over these years have remained elusive and difficult to address experimentally. This Thesis is composed by four studies which taking together put forward for consideration several ideas. First, there is a substantial amount of visual inputs that are processed outside the focus of overt attention, and not available for conscious access, that still activates mechanisms in medial prefrontal control networks related to conscious and attentional processes. Neural theta oscillatory activity may stand as a neurobiological mechanism by which the medial-frontal networks monitor and regulate inappropriate actions that are automatically triggered by environmental information to which we remain oblivious. Second, practice leads to functional changes in neurophysiological signatures associated with error-monitoring and error-awareness processes, which are crucial during the acquisition of new motor skills and learning. Third, self-generated errors and errors related to agency violations are evaluated by distinct neural networks. The medial-frontal cortex is crucial for the evaluation of the correctness of ones actions while the parietal cortex seems to be more involved in providing a coherent sense of the agency, or sense of control, over ones actions. Finally, different thresholds of error-tolerance in humans are related to different decisional processes and distinct patterns of cortical activity during the monitoring of redundant error feedback information in contexts involving rule-based decisions. These differences may reflect the externalization of distinctive cognitive schemas and standards of self-reinforcement to cope with errorful information in contexts requiring complex decision-making processes. I believe that the findings forward in this dissertation are important to validate current neurophysiological evidences and theories regarding human error processing and cognitive control processes and may offer a great contribution to understand the extent and depth to which the human error-monitoring system can be studied extended and ecological contexts. |
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