The human cognitive system corrects traces of error commission on the fly

Abstract

Human perception and action rely on a fundamental binding mechanism that forges integrated event representations from distributed features. Encountering any one of these features later on can retrieve the whole event, thus expediting cognitive processing. The traditional view on binding confines it to successful action episodes, holding that the human cognitive system does not leverage errors for optimizing corresponding event representations. Here we use sequential analyses of erroneous action episodes to explore whether binding promotes future successful behavior even when actions go awry. Results indicate that the processes leading to binding integrate different aspects of the action episode in a highly efficient and flexible manner to privilege future correct actions and prepare the ground for error-based learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).