PRESS RELEASE

What We’ve Learned From Our Mistakes: Insights From Error-Related Brain Activity

Greg Hajcak

Error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential that provides a neural measure of error processing. ERN is often examined by having participants perform speeded tasks and analyzing brain activity on trials in which they make mistakes. In this article, Hajcak reviews research related to ERN’s relationship to defensive responses, its relationship to anxiety disorders, and its potential role as a neurobehavioral trait reflecting individual differences in defensive reactivity.

A Window on Reality: Perceiving Edited Moving Images

Tim J. Smith, Daniel Levin, and James E. Cutting

Edited moving pictures — such as movies and television — have long been a source of enjoyment; however, few researchers have studied the psychology behind our ability to understand film. In this article, Smith, Levin, and Cutting investigate how we perceive movies. They specifically focus on continuity editing — a type of editing that allows the viewer to seamlessly integrate different perspecitves of a scene. The authors discuss how research on individual and group patterns of attention can and are being utilized to make scene editing as seamless as possible for the viewer.