“Errors are ubiquitous,” notes a paper that appears in this week’s edition of Science. So, it’s rather important that we have the ability to catch and correct them. Researchers have come up with a number of models for how this process works but, according to a paper published in this week’s edition of Science, these models have typically been tested in overly simplistic systems. So, they devised a way of studying error recognition in a more complex task: set a typist loose on a computer, and randomly introduce errors or correct misspellings on them. The typists’ responses suggest that at least two different error recognition processes are at work.

The authors hypothesize that there are two distinct processes at work when a person starts to type. The first plays an executive function, figuring out what words need to be typed and comparing the final output with the overall goal (they term that the “outer loop”). That process feeds its intentions to a second one that the authors term an “inner loop.” This translates the general intentions to the muscle movements that actually get the goal accomplished. By changing words on the typists, the researchers managed to separate the error recognition processes involved in these two loops.

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Messing with typists reveals two-level error correction in brain