Peer Review of "Reflection on 'Trial and Error (-Related Negativity)'

Abstract

This paper is about error on three levels. First of all, it deals with research into the ERN, error-related negativity. The ERN is a negative deflection in the EEG signal, which tends to occur within 100 milliseconds of making an error. The authors hypothesize that physical pain can be considered as a bodily signal that a type of error has been committed: there is a "discrepancy between the actual and optimal/targeted state", as the authors put it (p.1). This raises the question whether the ERN is also associated with pain and the avoidance of pain, and if so how. More specifically the authors want to know whether people with an elevated ERN are more prone to avoidance behaviour, which in turn can lead to chronic pain. I am an historian of psychology with philosophical interests and have no expertise in clinical neuropsychology, so I will not comment on this hypothesis. But the paper also deals with error in two other ways, which I do feel able to reflect on. The authors describe their attempts to develop an experimental paradigm for the study of the role of the ERN in pain avoidance. In these attempts they make errors which they then try to correct in a further attempt, six task versions in total. This is the second way this paper deals with errors -those of the experimenters themselves. But there is a third level too: it is crucial for the experimental task to induce the participant to make the right number of errors -not too many, not too few. The second and third aspects are obviously related: the errors of the experimenters concern, among others, the number of errors the participants make. The authors describe their challenge as an interdisciplinary one: they had to combine elements of neurophysiology (ERN) with clinical psychology (pain avoidance). Specifically: they had to somehow induce an ERN in the participants, and elicit and measure some type of avoidance behaviour at the same time. Moreover, to determine what each participant’s average ERN is, they needed at least six ERN measures per participant, and thus a minimum of six errors. The errors, finally, had to be "inhibition errors", not errors due to lack of knowledge or skill. It wasn’t clear to me why this was important, or what an inhibition error is in the first place, but this is no doubt due to my own lack of knowledge in this field. All in all, the specifications of the task were narrow and demanding: not any type of error would do (only inhibition errors); the errors had to produce a proper ERN; a minimum of six was needed; the participants had to be aware of their error (otherwise they would not show avoidance behaviour); and of course there had to be pain associated with the errors, but not so much pain that the ethics committee would reject the pilot study, or the subjects would refuse to participate. What followed was a kind of dance, or rather a series of dances, with the experimenters leading the participants, successively trying different choreographies in an attempt to get their partners to make the right moves and not step on their toes. In a recent article, Brenninkmeijer, Rietzschel, and I reported on a series of interviews we had conducted with researchers in psychology (Brenninkmeijer et al., 2019). We had asked them about their informal research practices, that is to say, those practices that are not made explicit in the method section of a paper but are nevertheless considered important. We saw two themes in their answers. The first is a strong concern with professionalism, expressing itself a.o.among others in an orderly lab and a smoothly running experiment, and respectful conduct towards the participants. The second theme is a focus on producing good data by managing the performance of the participant. This second theme is relevant with regard to this paper on ’Trial and Error’. Much of the work that is done in the lab, including the kind of informal, unwritten work that we explored in our interviews, is geared towards eliciting the right kind of behaviour from the participant. What happens in the lab has a theatrical quality: a particular performance is expected from the participants, and they are guided to it by the staging and scripting (or choreography) of the experiment and the conduct of the experimenter. Our interviewees mentioned