Figure 1.

The Error Awareness Task (EAT). The EAT presents a serial stream of single color words in colored fonts. Participants were trained to respond to each of the words with a single “Go trial” button press, and to withhold this response when either of two different circumstances arose. The first was if the same word was presented on two consecutive trials (Repeat No-go), and the second was if the word and font of the word matched (Color No-go). To indicate “error awareness” participants were trained to forego the regular go trial button response and instead to execute the alternative “error awareness” response following any commission error. Past studies have demonstrated that error-related BOLD signal is uninfluenced by the awareness response itself (Hester et al., 2005). Although levels of awareness undoubtedly vary on a continuum, we made a qualitative distinction between “Aware” and “Unaware” errors to facilitate our event-related fMRI analysis. Figure reproduced from Hester and colleagues (2012).