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Category: Project

Description: Participants often tend to slow down after committing an error (the so-called post-error slowing or PES). This behavioral phenomenon has been observed across many tasks and situations, and different theoretical accounts have been proposed for it (ranging from non-strategic attentional accounts to strategic cognitive control accounts, and a mixture of the two). However, the idea that individuals generally slow down after errors has been challenged by a series of findings, including from our labs. Specifically, we found across gambling studies that participants sped up after suboptimal outcomes (i.e., a loss) and initiated the next trial faster. These findings were inconsistent with the different theoretical accounts and question the idea that strategic adjustments are made after suboptimal outcomes.