The human mind does not like to make any mistakes and finds time to avoid repeating them. A new study conducted by researchers fromUniversity of Iowa shows how the human brainin just one second, is able to distinguish between a result caused by a human error and one where the person is not directly responsible.
The results of research were published on The Journal of Neuroscience.
Human error: this is how the brain reacts
Researchers have found that in cases of human error, the brain takes longer to catalog the error and inform the rest of the body to avoid repeat the mistake.
“The innovative aspect of this study is that the brain can very quickly distinguish whether an unwanted outcome is due to (human) error or something else,” he says Jan Wesselprofessor at the Iowa Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the corresponding author of the study. “If the brain realizes that the cause is an error, it will initiate further processes to avoid further errors, which it will not do if the result is not due to its own action.”
Iowa researchers discovered the the brain’s ability to separate human error from non-self-inflicted error by asking 76 young adults to look at a group of arrows and choose the correct direction that a specific arrow was pointing.
Almost every time the subjects answered – almost always correctly, given the simplicity of the task – a triangle appeared on the screen. But every now and then, on the screen another appeared symbol (an anchor, a frog, a helicopter, etc.), intended to simulate a “surprise” or an unexpected result and, above all, to appear even when the subject responded correctly and expected the triangle.
The researchers measured at three different intervals (350, 1,700, and 3,000 milliseconds) how the brain responded to situations with the standard outcome (the triangle) and the surprise outcome (a different symbol). What they found was that the brain can distinguish between the two outcomes after about one second (1,000 milliseconds).
If human error is the reason for the result, the brain remains active for another two to three seconds, the researchers found. This means that the brain realizes that a mistake has been made and essentially wants to learn from it.
“When it comes to something that has to do with my action and I can do something about it, then the brain takes a few seconds to reconfigure the whole cognitive apparatusThe visual systemThe motor system“, says Wessel, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Neurology. “It’s as if the brain takes a moment to inform the rest of the body, the senses, the motor control, to tell the other functioning parts: ‘Let’s not do this again.’”
The researchers also measured brain waves through electroencephalograms scalp (EEG) and observed ongoing neural activity that was unique to cases where human error occurred.
“Indeed, we found that while both errors and unexpected outcomes of correct actions led to comparable neural activity early on, only errors showed reliable brain activity and sustained more than a second after the response,” says Wessel.
Previous research has shown that the brain can recognize cases where human error has occurred, but there was debate as to whether brain reaction a result was the same regardless of whether the cause was human error or not.
Some argue that we don’t actually have a real tracking system errors in the brain“, observes Wessel. But Wessel’s research shows that the brain distinguishes between error and no error and communicates information about both outcomes with the rest of the body.
“All in all, this shows that we have genuine, error-specific systems in the human brain that detect errors in our actions that trigger adaptive responsessuch as the strategic slowdown of ongoing actions,” says Wessel.
In another study, researchers at the University of Iowa designed a simple computer test to assess how easily i young adults they elderly people they realize they made a mistake.
Older adults performed just as well as younger people in tests that involved looking away from an object that appeared on the screen. But younger adults recognized more often than older adults when they couldn’t look away from the object. AND older adults were more likely to be adamant they hadn’t made a mistake.
“The good news is that older adults perform the tasks we assigned them just as well as younger ones, albeit more slowly,” says Jan Wessel, assistant professor in the UI’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and corresponding author of the study. “But we discover that in the elderly there is this reduced ability to recognize an error when they have committed one.”
The research offers new insights into how older adults perceive their decisions, and especially how they view their performance, whether judging their own ability to drive or how regularly they believe they have taken medications. “Making fewer mistakes can have more serious consequences,” says Wessel, “because you can’t fix a mistake you don’t realize you’ve made.”
Wessel’s team recruited 38 younger adults (average age 22) and 39 older adults (average age 68) to carry out a series of test which involved looking away from a circle that appeared in a box on one side of a computer screen.
Even though the test was simple, the younger adults couldn’t resist looking at the circle before moving their gaze, on average, about 20 percent of the time. This is to be expected, Wessel says, since it is in the human nature focus on something new or unexpected, and the researchers wanted participants to make mistakes.
After each failed application, participants were asked if they had made a mistake. They were then asked “how sure they are” and used a sliding scale from “unsure” to “very sure” to determine how sure they were that they had made a mistake on the test.
The youngest participants were correct in recognizing that they had made a mistake 75% of the time. The older participants were correct 63 percent of the time when asked if they were wrong. This means that in In more than a third of cases, older participants did not realize they had made a mistake.
Even more, younger participants who made a mistake on the test were much less confident that they had been right than older participants. In other words, the younger ones covered themselves more.
“This shows that when younger adults thought they were right, but actually made a mistake, they still had some suspicion that they might have made a mistake,” says Wessel, affiliated with the Department of Neurology and Iowa Neuroscience Institute. “Older people often have no idea that they are wrong.”
The researchers underlined these observations by measuring the dilation of the pupils of the participants during the tests. In humans and most animals, pupils dilate when something unexpected happens, triggered by surprise, fear and other basic emotions. It also happens when people think they’ve made a mistake, which is why the researchers measured pupils in the experiments.
The researchers found that young adults’ pupils dilated when they thought they had made a mistake. This effect was reduced when they made mistakes they didn’t recognize. By comparison, older adults showed a strong reduction in pupil dilation after errors they recognized and showed no dilation when they made an error they did not recognize.
“This mirrors what we see in the behavioral observationsi,” says Wessel, “who very often don’t know when they’ve made a mistake.”
In Italy, according to theISTAT: “The average age of the population rose from 45.7 years at the beginning of 2020 and 46.5 at the beginning of 2023. As of January 1, 2023, there were 14 million 177 thousand people over the age of 65, the 24.1% (almost a quarter) of the total population.
The number of people is also growing over eightywhich reach 4 million 529 thousand and represent 7.7 percent of residents, while since the beginning of the millennium the number of over-centenarians has tripled.
In reverse, the number of individuals of active age is decreasingbetween 15 and 64 years old, which drops to 37 million 339 thousand (63.4%).
The number of younger people is also decreasing: children up to 14 years of age are 7 million 334 thousand (12.5% of the total population) resident. Therefore, the participation of young people in the economic and social life of the country becomes crucial to guarantee an inclusive and sustainable development model and a correct balance of the welfare system”.
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