1. Age-related post-error slowing and stimulus repetition effect in motor inhibition during a stop-signal task
- Author
-
Howard Muchen Hsu and Shulan Hsieh
- Subjects
Adult ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Poison control ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Stimulus (physiology) ,Audiology ,Stop signal ,050105 experimental psychology ,Task (project management) ,Orienting response ,Young Adult ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Injury prevention ,Reaction Time ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Aged ,Repetition (rhetorical device) ,05 social sciences ,General Medicine ,Inhibition, Psychological ,Negative priming ,Psychology ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery - Abstract
This study aims to investigate how older adults react to a failed-inhibition error while performing a stop-signal task. That is, whether elderly people would exhibit enlarged post-error slowing and whether such slowing revealed an adaptive process, maladaptive process, or a mixture of maladaptive followed by adaptive processes. This study also addresses if the post-error process might further interact with a stimulus repetition effect based on the memory retrieval explanation. A group of 34 younger adults (age range 20-30 years) and a group of 34 older adults (age range 60-80 years) were included for the analyses. The results of the current study supported a mixture model by showing that older adults exhibited a larger post-error slowing than younger adults, and their post-error slowing was initially accompanied by deceased accuracy that then increased on the subsequent trial. Furthermore, such post-error slowing on older adults only occurred in the trial condition where the stimulus was repeated from the previous trial suggesting a memory-based process (a form of negative priming) involved in post-error processes. The implication of the current finding is that older adults might maintain the ability to detect and monitor the response error, yet their post-error adjustment might require a much longer time to start functioning well after the initial detrimental orienting response to the error and the entire process was memory-based.
- Published
- 2021