Welcome to Professor Bill Gehring's Human Brain Electrophysiology Laboratory at the University of Michigan!

If you've ever said "oops!" you've experienced your brain detecting its own mistakes. What you may not know is that your brain, at just the moment you are making that error, is producing a pulse of electrical activity known as the Error-Related Negativity (ERN). The goal of our lab is to understand what your brain is trying to accomplish when it produces an ERN. We also want to understand why certain kinds of mental illness are associated with unusually large or small ERNs. In these pages, you can read more about our research, download some of our papers, and (if you're a student at the University of Michigan) you can find out how to participate in our experiments or help out in our laboratory.  

You can read all about the ERN in this (long!) book chapter (PDF): Gehring, W. J., Liu, Y., Orr, J. M., & Carp, J. (2012). The error-related negativity (ERN/Ne). In S. J. Luck, & E. Kappenman (eds.), Oxford handbook of event-related potential components (pp. 231-291). New York: Oxford University Press.

My collaborators and I recently wrote a retrospective piece on how our ERN research got started back in the late 1980's and early 1990's:  Gehring, W. J., Goss, B., Coles, M. G. H., Meyer, D. E., & Donchin, E. (2018). The error-related negativity.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 200-204.

You can find a list of publications on Bill Gehring's Google Scholar page and a list and links to PDFs are on the lab publications page.