title: Lapses in a prefrontal-extrastriate preparatory attention network predict mistakes.
abstract: Mistakes are common to all forms of behavior but there is disagreement about what causes errors. We recorded electrophysiological and behavioral measures in a letter discrimination task to examine whether deficits in preparatory attention predicted subsequent response errors. Error trials were characterized by decreased frontal-central preparatory attention event-related potentials (ERPs) prior to stimulus presentation and decreased extrastriate sensory ERPs during visual processing. These findings indicate that transient lapses in a prefrontal-extrastriate preparatory attention network can lead to response errors.
authors.affiliation: University of California at Berkeley, USA. mayralpadilla@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Mayra L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Padilla
authors.forename: Richard A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Wood
authors.forename: Laura A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Hale
authors.forename: Robert T
authors.initials: RT
authors.lastname: Knight
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology*; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000502:physiology; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values