Your Fault or My Fault? Investigating Possible Error-Related Potential Differences Stemming from Internal/external Error Attribution in a Screen-Based Task

Abstract

Errors can be present in any human-executed task. With a controlled experiment to induce execution errors that can either be attributed to the user themselves or an external entity involved in the task, we intend to investigate whether the difference in task error blame attribution entity results in observable differences in error related potential (ErrP) correlates. Inspired by a production process that is still commonly executed manually, we implement an emulated cable assembly task in which cables need to be placed according to the instruction set from memory. To first test the validity of ErrPs, we implement the initial version of the experiment in a screen based, mouse and keyboard setup. We develop a screen-based simulation of a cable placement task, in which error feedback can be triggered in two different scenarios: when the user places the wrong cable (self-attributed error), or when the evaluation system makes a false error evaluation (external-attributed error). We expect to be able to replicate the onsets of ErrPs in general for all trials flagged with error feedback, and we intend to compare the ErrP characteristics between the two different error conditions. Given the prevalence of human errors in work related contexts, the possibility of decoding error fault attribution from electroencephalography data has the potential to further increase adoption of brain-computer Interface (BCI) for detection, analysis and prevention of errors.