this outcome could play a role in alcohol’s effects on posterror adjustment. In addition, the Pe component, associated in previous work with error awareness (Hester et al., 2005; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2001), was also reduced by alcohol, suggesting some support for the impaired error detection hypothesis. However, inspection of the path coefficients in Figure 8 shows that neither overt error recognition nor the purported neurophysiological signal of error awareness is a plausible mediator of alcohol’s effects on posterror adjustment. Specifically, although alcohol reduced Pe amplitude, the Pe was not associated with posterror adjustment. Also, the nonsignificant path from overt error recognition to posterror adjustment, coupled with the fact that alcohol did not reduce error recognition, means that impaired recognition of errors was not responsible for significant variance in the effects of alcohol on posterror adjustment. Thus, the error-detection hypothesis was not supported by these data.
