Nonhuman primates exhibit error type-dependent post-error slowing across modalities
- 1Brown University
Abstract
Mistakes make up our daily lives. Once a mistake has been committed, it is common to pause before you continue. This slowing is called post-error slowing (PES). Although several theories have been proposed to account for PES in humans, findings across cognitive tasks show variation in how PES occurs, and it is unclear how this phenomenon may translate across modalities to a key model organism of human cognition, macaque monkeys. To determine whether monkeys exhibit PES, we tested three rhesus macaque monkeys in components of cognitive sequential decision-making tasks that used either eye tracking or touch screens to report responses. Here we show that monkeys exhibit non-adaptive, error type-dependent PES across modalities. Task structure and context also modulated PES in the eye tracking task, and no modality improved task performance following PES. These results suggest that monkey PES is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive related responses to error that are modulated by task structures such as error type and task context. Overall, the flexibility in monkey PES is comparable to that of humans, further supporting the importance of monkeys as a translational model in investigating the mechanisms of PES.
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BibTeX
@misc{kaneko2026nonhuman,
title = {{Nonhuman primates exhibit error type-dependent post-error slowing across modalities}},
author = {N. Kaneko and M. Nwokolo and K. Conen and B. Stewart and T. M. Desrochers},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.23.753764},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.23.753764v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Nonhuman primates exhibit error type-dependent post-error slowing across modalities
AU - N. Kaneko
AU - M. Nwokolo
AU - K. Conen
AU - B. Stewart
AU - T. M. Desrochers
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.23.753764
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.23.753764v1
AB - Mistakes make up our daily lives. Once a mistake has been committed, it is common to pause before you continue. This slowing is called post-error slowing (PES). Although several theories have been proposed to account for PES in humans, findings across cognitive tasks show variation in how PES occurs, and it is unclear how this phenomenon may translate across modalities to a key model organism of human cognition, macaque monkeys. To determine whether monkeys exhibit PES, we tested three rhesus macaque monkeys in components of cognitive sequential decision-making tasks that used either eye tracking or touch screens to report responses. Here we show that monkeys exhibit non-adaptive, error type-dependent PES across modalities. Task structure and context also modulated PES in the eye tracking task, and no modality improved task performance following PES. These results suggest that monkey PES is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive related responses to error that are modulated by task structures such as error type and task context. Overall, the flexibility in monkey PES is comparable to that of humans, further supporting the importance of monkeys as a translational model in investigating the mechanisms of PES.
ER -