Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential (ERP) component generated in anterior cingulate cortexthat reflects reward sensitivity and error aversion (Hajcak & Foti, 2008). In a spelling decision task that included a mon-etary reward for good performance, Harris, Perfetti, and Rickles (2014) found that mean ERN amplitude was associatedwith an offline behavioral measure of spelling knowledge, suggesting that expert spellers are more error-averse during areward-based spelling task than those with less expertise. However, task performance alone is an imperfect indicator of ex-pertise, because a correct response could result from guessing or motor error. In the present study, we investigated whetherthe left-lateralized N170, an ERP component directly tied to orthographic expertise, was associated with ERN effect size inthe spelling decision task. We found that mean N170 amplitude correlated positively with mean ERN amplitude, indicatingthat experts experience greater aversion to errors than non-experts.