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Predicting Human Errors From Brain Activity
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Apr 24, 2008 09:03 PM
from the good-with-shock-collars dept.
from the good-with-shock-collars dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers report that brain activity can be used to predict the likelihood of someone making an error about six seconds in advance, with gradual changes starting as much as 30 seconds ahead of time. The team used an imaging machine to scan the brains of a group of volunteers who performed a task in the presence of distracting information. When performing correctly the volunteers' brains showed increased levels of activity in those parts associated with cognitive effort, as would be expected. However, these areas gradually became less active before errors were made and at the same time another set of regions in the brain became more active. These regions are part of a so-called "default mode network" and show increased use when people are resting or asleep [PDF]. While imaging machines are far too big and complex to be used in workplaces to monitor the brain activity of people engaged in important tasks, the team hopes to correlate errors to changes in electrical activity in the brain with electroencephalography (EEG), using electrodes placed on the scalp. If EEG features can be found that correspond to the change in brain activity, then a hat that gives warning of an imminent mistake might one day become reality. We've previously discussed similar studies of brain activity."
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Brain Study Calls Free Will Into Question 733 comments
siddster notes an account up at Wired of research indicating that brain scanners can see your decisions before you make them. "In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them... Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will... The experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions... Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
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I don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Mod parent up!
Parent
Re:I agree (Score:5, Funny)
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thats a Bad Analogy, Guy! (Score:3, Funny)
Genius, he has it (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I agree (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have ever take part of a Stroop test, your ACC has been activated. In a Stroop test, the word for a color is printed in a different color i.e. the word green is shown in the color red. A participant is asked to say either the word or the color. As the speed of doing these discriminations increases, so do errors; interestingly, cognizance of errors is nearly instantaneous, however. You know that you made an error, even before the neural circuitry committed to speaking the words has finished forming the words.
The ACC becomes more active in Stroop tests because Stroop tests cause conflicts in two neural circuits. The ACC arbitrates these circuits. Therefore, an increase in ACC activity (which will happen in advance of the error occurring) correlates with an increase in likelihood of mistakes...more in-depth research and some algorithms (I haven't RTFA) means that an error can be predicted, but of course, not with 100% success.
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http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/1130/brainimagingwz8.jpg [imageshack.us]
Re:I agree (Score:4, Funny)
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That said, I vote for an increase of TLAs
Re:I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are using a computer, and you are presented with a dialog to either delete a file or cancel the dialog. You do not want to delete the file, but you click the delete button anyway. In your brain, before your finger clicks the mouse button (because
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If you're falling asleep... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why else would car insurance rates rise when you get into an accident? Um... you know, aside from evil insurance companies?
Re:I don't believe it (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFS, it sounds like people are getting distracted and bored doing stupid mind-numbing tasks and when they do so, they make errors. As such, they have invented a bulky and expensive way to tell when you're drifting off (and that is fairly well correlated with making errors.)
Parent
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My wife starting the weed whacker... error inbound!
My daughter drinking... error inbound!
I can predict those types of errors well in advance of seconds... geez, that's not rocket science at all.
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As an aside, I don't know much about trees and leaves,
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Keep in mind that in this study errors are not actually predicted before they happen in real time. That's vi
So much for... (Score:2)
Put electrodes on your scalp to detect errors? (Score:4, Funny)
And I certainly hope it never hits the market.
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Great Name.
I was going to say you would need to take the hat off to install Vista cuz of the noise, but THAT would be just begging for +FLAMEBAIT wouldn't it?
I also wonder if the hat will know you will make the mistake of ignoring it's warning. Kind of like an infinite loop of stupidity?
P.S - To the MS Fans, i'm just kidding about Vista. Loosen up a bit
an idea... (Score:5, Funny)
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that is a paradox so unimaginable, it is making my brain hurt...
Please...Provide me with some form of analogy so i can make sense of it all...
Errors? (Score:2, Insightful)
"You're gonna make an error."
*user has minor panic, nervousness, etc*
"See? You errored. You suck."
Makes me wonder if it would self-perpetuate if it were a self-monitored system rather than an externally monitored one - and once externally monitored, would the reaction time be sufficent to prevent the error? Sounds like some sli
Re:Errors? (Score:4, Informative)
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But can it predict (Score:2, Informative)
Nope. Different research. (Score:2)
The old article you linked is about detecting a signature corresponding to an early stage of decision making. This one is about detecting a signature of the brain going into a resting / attention wandering state that causes decisions to be error-prone.
That's good news! (Score:3, Insightful)
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If there is some relaible way to 'perk them up' for their stint, or wake them up when they're dosing, it'll be a good and cheap way to improve real security.
W7 (Score:3, Funny)
"Default mode". We got it in spades. (Score:2)
Not necessary. I can verify that our upper management will, when given the opportunity, make entirely the worng decision nine times out of ten. If an opportunity is not present, they'll keep attritting smart, capable people (not that there were a lot around here to begin with) until they create an opportunity. It's called "default mode management".
Now
The "error detection" hat may be misinterpreted. (Score:4, Interesting)
The signature they're describing corresponds, not just to a lack of alertness, but specifically a lack of alertness because the brain is going into a resting state. Seems to me that might be because all this decision-making has made the working regions of the brain tired and the brain is trying to clear them out so they'll operate properly again. So the problem is not the lack of alertness, but the attempt to continue to make decisions during the resting cycle.
Given that, a better use of the feedback might be to tell the wearer that it's time to stop making important decisions and take a break, rather than trying to overuse a "mental muscle" that's exhausted - and perhaps train him to recognize the mental state himself so he can then dispense with the hat.
The "break times" in working days were set up when studies showed that taking breaks, despite the "work time lost", resulted in more and better work in the work time remaining. This looks like a way to optimize the process, rather than running breaks on a clock.
Re:The "error detection" hat may be misinterpreted (Score:2)
Farts (Score:2)
Now we can use a portable EEG scanner built into a baseball cap to detect when a brain fart is about to occur.
Ain't technology wonderful?
Over-Reaching a Bit (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem as I see it is that since they can't determine causaltiy, and only conducted this experiment with a small sample population, and with a specific task, is it could have been the task itself causing the particular regions to become active after a certain period of time. I just gave the article a quick look through, but I'd be curious to see if the errors came in distinct, set intervals. It could be simply the nature of the task that caused the activity. Furthermore, what about left handed participants? What about age groups outside of the twenties (which are a particular cohort, and can be expected to have similiar results/activity as such)? It seems like they failed to counterbalance either their participants or their trials in any meaningful way.
Also, I'm not familiar with this journal or whatever it is, but I've never seen one where the methods section came last, which is a little strange. That's almost always the first thing I go to after the abstract.
Walking (Score:2, Interesting)
I think they are detecting abortive hand-off attempts: A training process for a different part of the brain than one's conscious mind. More complex motions or actions require more training. I think what we need isn't more concentration, but more error toleranc
Odd (Score:2)
The Head of the Microsoft Vista development group (Score:3, Funny)
I Can Do This, Too, Sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
EEG, Prediciting and Probability (Score:3, Informative)
An Israeli team found that an increase in degree of synchronization of midline frontal theta EEG varied inversely with the probability of making a mistake. Such theta synchronization occurs over spans of 10 to 30 seconds. They also found that when a response occurs during the rising or falling slope of the synchronized theta (as opposed to near a peak), the person was more likely to make a mistake. The latter probably is the source of the evoked potential called the Error Related Negativity; it is the brain preparing to notice the error. The former seems to indicate a lagging in attention, which is when errors are most likely to occur. The two are related, meaning the brain "knows" when it is starting to droop and is more likely to make a mistake, and tells itself to get ready to notice a mistake if it happens.
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I can also tell with 100% certainty that a person wearing a ballcap will make a mistake. That mistake is asking me to fix their computer.