Consciousness of Error: How Origin Shapes Awareness and Learning

Abstract

Errors are often regarded as obstacles to be minimized, yet psychological and neuroscience research suggests they may serve as critical signals for learning. In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz (2010) framed error as a universal cognitive condition, but left unanswered whether all errors equally contribute to conscious awareness and adaptation. Building on this gap, the present paper examines how the origin and confidence of errors influence memory and learning. Recent work shows that high-confidence errors are tied to perceptual processing (Alilović et al., 2023), while low-confidence errors reflect later decisional mechanisms; complementary evidence suggests that predictions and errors are anatomically segregated in V1 (Thomas et al., 2024). A behavioural experiment is proposed to test whether perceptual (high-confidence) versus cognitive (low-confidence) errors differ in their likelihood of being consciously encoded and remembered. It is predicted that high-confidence errors will be more accessible to memory and thus more likely to facilitate learning. Counter-evidence shows that confidence and awareness can diverge (Lau & Passingham, 2006; Overgaard et al., 2006) and that learning can occur without awareness (Tsushima et al., 2006), suggesting Schulz’s framing requires refinement. Taken together, confidence appears to act as a functional gatekeeper of error-based learning, but unconscious mechanisms also shape adaptation.