EEG error-related potentials encode magnitude of errors and individual perceptual thresholds

Abstract

Error-related potentials (ErrP) are a prominent electroencephalogram (EEG) correlate of performance monitoring, and so crucial for learning and adapting our behavior. Although there exists an agreement that ErrP signal awareness to errors, it remains poorly understood whether they encode further information. Here we report an experiment with sixteen participants during three recording sessions in which occasional visuomotor rotations of varying magnitude occurred during a cursor reaching task. We designed a brain-computer interface (BCI) to detect ErrP in single trials that provided real-time feedback to participants by changing the color of the cursor upon ErrP detection. The individual ErrP-BCI decoders exhibited good transfer across recording sessions and scalability over the varying magnitude of errors. Our results indicate that ErrPs encode not only the conscious perception of errors, but also their magnitude, in their amplitude and latency. Furthermore, a non-linear relationship between the ErrP-BCI output and the magnitude of errors predicts individual perceptual thresholds to detect rotations. The uncovered relationship is consistent with non-human primate studies, which found a similar relationship between the size of errors and simple spike activity of Purkinje cells, and we conjecture a cerebellar contribution to ErrP. Our experimental setup and findings open new avenues to probe and extend current theories of performance monitoring, which are based on response conflict tasks, by incorporating continuous human-interaction tasks as well as analysis of the ErrP complex as a whole rather than individual peaks.