Rochet, N. , Casini, L. , Thierry, H. & Burle, B.
Laboratoire de Neurobiologie de la Cognition, Universite de provence/CNRS ,Marseille,France
In conflicting situations, incorrect responses tend to be activated. Subjects consciously and reliably detect suprathreshold activations leading to error commission (>90%). However, electromyographic recording in such tasks reveal that most of the incorrect activations remain subtreshold. In such trials, the subliminal activations were interrupted and corrected, revealing the involvement of cognitive control mechanisms. The question as to whether those subliminal incorrect activations are consciously perceived remains an important open issue since it has been argued that cognitive control processes require conscious experience. Awareness of incorrect response activation was assessed by asking the participants, after every trial, to report how confident they were to have activated the incorrect response. Signal Detection Theory was used to characterise subject detection performance. Mean d' and beta were high, indicating that subjects were able to detect their partial errors, but reported such detection only when they were certain. Furthermore, subjects took longer to correct detected incorrect activations. The amplitude of incorrect EMG activation correlates with subjects detection. This suggests that subjects are aware of having produced an incorrect motor command and that awareness delays correction. In most cases, cognitive processes implicated in partial error control remain unconscious.