It has been a question of debate whether immediate error corrections in speeded forced-choice reaction time tasks require an error detection signal from the performance monitoring system or whether they reflect delayed correct responses that are executed after the premature error like in a horserace.
Although premature termination errors incur costs approximately proportional to the number of residues translated before the error occurred (npre, fig. 1), frameshifting errors incur an additional cost (npost) because the ribosome carries on translating until it encounters an off-frame stop codon or the mRNA ends.
In contrast, premature termination errors lead to truncation of variable severity depending on where along the mRNA the error occurs.
Such premature closure errors are most common when doctors over-rely on intuitive thinking (gut feel based on their past experiences and training) and don't do enough disciplined analytical thinking (defining the other conditions that the symptoms might represent).
In contrast, selection against premature termination errors does not predict 5′-3′ differobustnessbustoess to ameliorate with rising GC content.
Selection against premature termination errors predicts a gradient in codon adaptation toward greater decoding accuracy at the 3′ end of mRNAs, predicated on npre as the principal process cost.
For instance, the ribosome can also abandon the nascent polypeptide before completion (drop-off, premature termination error) or leave the correct reading frame and elongate the peptide chain based on nucleotide triplets never meant to serve as a template for protein synthesis (frameshifting error) (Parker 1989).
There are, however, multiple forms of inaccuracy (missense, premature termination, and frameshifting errors) and pinpointing a particular error process behind apparently adaptive mRNA anatomy is rarely straightforward.
In the rodent 5-CSRTT, differences between premature responding and false errors (analogous to Go/NoGo or Continuous Performance Task commission errors) have been highlighted (45).
But it is important to acknowledge that frameshifting incurs a compound cost (npre + npost), which distinguishes this particular translational error from, for example, premature termination or drop-off errors, which only incur npre.
