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."
I've seen some stupid research in my time, but actually believing you can predict errors in advance is like saying you can predict which leaf will fall off of a tree in the next 6 seconds.
The parent post makes a very good point. I agree with him wholeheartedly. You may be able to predict actions, but how can you predict whether an action will be an error?
No no, you see, he was proving that you can't predict mistakes before they happen. If someone could, why would they allow him to agree with himself? He's... taking one for the team, if you will.
Parent makes sense intuitively, but there are parts of the brain that are very sensitive to conflict; the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is one of these.
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.
As someone who has taken too many of these tests, the problem ends up being your mind gets bored with the whole exercise withing minutes... these test take hours. After about 10 minutes at MOST, your brain starts to wander. You can NOT focus on the test no matter how much mental effort you put into these. It simulates situations like driving a car where actions and attention become so repetitive that there is an autopilot mode that kicks in. Bit in the same regard it can't be applied logically to situations like being in a boxing ring, because in those circumstances your brain is constantly adjusting to vectors that can't possibly be predicted, therefor always being up to paying attention at the task at hand.
But there are some subset of errors that are known to be errors when they are performed. Your analysis is for a certain type of error that, realistically, can't be predicted. So why bother. Here's the usage scenario for this type of "error" prediction...
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
I think it just predicts a lack of concentration. Though funnily enough, the times when I screw up in Guitar Hero are the times when I start thinking too much about what my fingers are doing instead of letting them get on with it, and then I panic when I realise how crazy it is trying to do 20 hammer ons in a row precisely (The Metal on Expert is crazy.. completed it twice now though in the last couple of days:) ).. it's a similar situation on a real guitar.. a song can be in muscle memory, but I can't al
The point as I understand it is that the machine notes when there is a drop in activity in the part of the brain responsible for whatever action you are preforming. A drop in brain activity increases the Likelihood of an error, but it does not say exactly when or how; just that the subject is no longer fully focused on the task and therefor errors will occur.
If you're falling asleep on the road, you're more likely to make the error of driving to one side. Similarly, if you're getting distracted by a stray thought, your concentration can suffer and are more likely to make errors in your primary task. You may not predict the exact error, but you can reasonably forecast an increased probability of error.
Why else would car insurance rates rise when you get into an accident? Um... you know, aside from evil insurance companies?
I don't know. This research is more like predicting whether leaves will fall in six seconds... when it can tell a big breeze is six seconds away.
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.)
Exactly. The problem with getting bored / distracted isn't so much that you make errors, but that you don't usually notice until after you start making mistakes -- but the distraction is already clearly present, and I see no reason it shouldn't be detectable.
This may or may not be stupid research, but it's far from implausible. Despite the sensational headline and the fact that the authors got their article in a good place, this kind of thing (brain activity predicting future behavior) is commonplace in functional brain imaging. I'm not saying your "I don't believe it" critique isn't well thought out, but perhaps you would like to be a little more specific about where you think the authors have gone wrong. As an aside, I don't know much about trees and leaves,
Basically this particular task (the "flankers task") is so easy that people only make errors when they stop paying attention. You see something like SSSHHSSS or HHHSSHHH and you have to respond to the central letters while filtering out the outside letters. So what is essentially happening is they are measuring when people's attention wanes and errors happen to be reliably associated with this.
Keep in mind that in this study errors are not actually predicted before they happen in real time. That's vi
Will they ever be able to make a hat that lets slashdot users know if they will be modded '+1 funny' vs '-1 flamebait?' 6 seconds before clicking 'submit?'
well, you were correct, so your post SHOULD have be modded '+1 insightful' however, if that were to happen, your post would no longer be insightful,it would become flamebait.
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...
My question is this: Will the knowledge that an error will occur cause the person in question to be even -more- likely to cause an error? Belief can be a dangerous thing in this case: "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
The device actually predicts when you are not concentrating on your work, and that is what people would be told if they ever were to use such a thing in production. I think the notice that you are losing concentration would probably be enough to get you concentrating again on your work. Especially if the workers were penalized for time spent not concentrating.
But it would be hard to concentrate if I was constantly worrying about losing concentration and being startled at any moment by a machine yelling "CONCENTRATE!!!!!!!!!!" at me.
This is not a dupe. (At least not of the previous one you linked.)
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.
It actually turns out this is relates to fairly important issues. For example a person's ability to detect guns or explosives is inversely correlated with the frequency of the same (data: go look at Wolfe & Horowitz). People perform badly in low frequency testing.
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.
... 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...
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 descriptions of "the error-detecting hat" look like the intent is to train the brain to stay alert and not make errors - or to refocus it when it wanders. (DING DING DING! HEY! WAKE UP! PAY ATTENTION!) The hat may be useful, but that use of the feedback may be the wrong approach.
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.
So, since the beginning of humanity itself, the plain old unaided human ear can listen for stomach and intestinal rumblings that come right before, and predict the coming of a big old juicy butt fart.
Now we can use a portable EEG scanner built into a baseball cap to detect when a brain fart is about to occur.
I have to agree with other people who've posted that this is over-reaching a little bit. This is nothing more than a correllational study: all they can say is that these systems, in this particular series of trials, showed increased activity shortly before an error took place.
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.
There are activities that can be handed off to the unconscious mind. If you are doing something so often that it seems like you could do it in your sleep, well, there's no reason not to hand it off to a subprocess and think about more important stuff.
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
I've always found that most of the mistakes that I have seen made or made myself were caused by moments of brain INACTIVITY (e.g. Hey y'all watch this)
I've noticed that before I make certain mistakes, or completely forget what I was doing, I will experience a spike in confusion. Sometimes, the ramp up the spike is slow, taking most of an hour; other times, it comes on me suddenly, taking only a minute. I feel confused and doing simple tasks are difficult. Then, it passes. Often, I will have completely forgotten what it was I was attempting to do, until much later when something reminds me.
"Prediction" is not accurate because that implies an absolute. The activity correlates with an increased probability of making a mistake. The study relies on statistics throughout, from the analysis of the fMRI data on, and so can only deal in probabilities.
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.
It sounds to me that the key finding is that they can detect when a person is distracted by monitoring their brain waves. A much more interesting finding than that distracted people make errors.
Is that some sort of canned response? Just unimaginative trolling? Because research into how the brain works is fascinating and has countless implications as far as self-understanding and self-improvement go. In no way could this be construed as pointing out something as obvious as "the sky is blue."
I can make an EEG monitor that IS a baseball cap. By carefully measuring the angle of the visor relative to the wearer's head, as well as a few environmental factors such as precipitation, temperature and altitude, I can identify half-bred imbeciles with shocking accuracy.
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.
I don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Mod parent up!
Parent
Re:I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
thats a Bad Analogy, Guy! (Score:3, Funny)
Genius, he has it (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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.