It’s a scenario that many students know all too well. It’s a Wednesday night at nine, and you have a midterm tomorrow. You sit at your desk with your textbook beside you, but haven’t managed to open it. Instead, you’re on the computer checking your email, checking the news, updating your Facebook. Then your friend calls and you talk for a half hour. Perhaps you notice the time slipping by, perhaps not. Suddenly, you realize that you are going to fail your exam if you don’t open your textbook soon.
What is that sudden flash of intuition that tells us a decision we are making is wrong? And why does it often come too late or not at all? These questions underpin a recent psychological study on correlations between academic performance and error-related negativity (ERN), an electro-physiological response that our brains emit when we make a mistake.
“ERN is like an alarm bell,” explains psychology doctoral student Jacob Hirsh, who worked on this study with Dr. Michael Inzlicht. “We spend most of our lives on auto-pilot, applying automatic behaviours to our daily situations. When something goes wrong, the anterior cingulated cortex (the part of the brain responsible for error detection) kicks in to let us know that we’ve made a mistake.”
According to Hirsh, some people have a higher ERN than others. The error detection process has two components: an emotional response, which causes anxiety and awareness of error, and a cognitive response, which gets us to do the right thing. He adds that different kinds of errors, whether calling someone by the wrong name, inadvertently driving your car over the curb or making a mistake on a test are dealt with by this same region. “All errors show the same strategic cognitive control mechanisms. However, if the task is considered important, it will show a higher neural response.”
Conducted over a four-month period, Inzlicht and Hirsh’s research consisted of testing 31 undergraduates from U of T’s Scarborough campus. The researchers set the students up with EEG caps and set them to perform a Stroop activity on the computer. Commonly used in psychological testing, the Stroop task involves looking at a series of spelled-out names of colours marked in a different colour (e.g. the word “blue” written in red ink).
“It’s a difficult task because people are used to processing linguistic signs more frequently than other kinds of signs, so the contradiction between the word and the colour throws them off. We chose this task because we knew that people would be prone to make mistakes while doing it,” Hirsh says.
After monitoring the subjects’ neurological ERN responses, Inzlicht and Hirsh looked at their academic transcripts and noticed a clear correlation between ERN and the students’ academic performance: those students with higher ERN tended to have better marks.
Hirsh stresses that this correlation is not necessarily related to the ability to understand academic material so much as to develop good study habits and maintain a high level of self-discipline. “School is a complex task that involves monitoring your own behaviour and making the right decisions on a daily basis,” he says.
According to Hirsh, ERN is one-half genetically determined, but the other half is influenced by environment and personal choice. “You can change the size of this response. It’s not set in stone. Sometimes, we have to direct our attention to get the desired results. This self-regulation is involved in many processes that involve self-control such as diet, exercise, and checking one’s impulses in social situations. It’s related to people’s knowing when to pay attention to their behaviour and recognize their mistakes.”
But what about all those people who tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, always falling into the same bad habits? Hirsh states that one useful way for students to improve their ERN is to pay conscious attention to mistakes, then analyze where they went wrong and try to apply a different strategy in the future. “The more you try self-regulation, the easier it becomes,” he says. “Also, structure your environment in a way that will help you to make better decisions. If you’re living in a messy house, that environment influences how you think about things. Your mind is as cluttered as your surroundings.”
Hirsh stresses that while a low level of ERN can lead people to impulsive and reckless behaviour, too much ERN is also not such a good thing. “People who overreact to their errors are candidates for anxiety disorders. In our study we found that a larger response is better, but if it’s too strong that isn’t good either because it can hinder your performance and your ability to change certain behaviours.”
Inzlicht and Hirsh recently published their study in the journal Psychophysiology. While much research has already been done on ERN, this is the first study to link it to academic performance. “We are taking this particular brain region out of the lab and showing that it has real-life applications to tasks in the world. People are seeing how it relates to real-life outcomes,” Hirsh says.
