Information Reduction—More than meets the eye?

Abstract

Information Reduction, a performance-enhancing cognitive strategy which develops with practice, is thought to be consciously and abruptly adopted and then applied consistently. Previous investigations used an Alphabet Verification Task where one observation was that not everyone adopts the strategy, but reasons for this are unclear. We demonstrated Information Reduction in three other tasks, confirming that it is not task-specific. Post-testing questionnaires probed verbally expressible knowledge, to gauge conscious awareness of any strategy. Overall, results indicate considerable variation in Information Reduction usage: Some individuals discovered and used the strategy and could verbally express this, others chose not to use it and some appeared to use it without awareness of doing so.Results also indicate that Information Reduction is not consistently applied, suggesting it is less robust than has been proposed. Our results may be better explained by a theory of practice learning which incorporates both data-driven automaticity and top-down controlled processes.

Attaining Automaticity in the Visual Numerosity Task is Not Automatic

“…Thus, the transition from controlled to automatic processing as a result of practice with a task, which is a feature of many theories of skill acquisition (e.g., Logan, 1988 ; Anderson and Lebiere, 1998 ), may not be an automatic feature of skill acquisition, at least for some people. Other work has demonstrated that not all experimental subjects adopt more efficient performance strategies when acquiring skills, but rather just improve the application of a less-efficient strategy ( Rowell et al, 2015 ). It is now an open question as to why some people do not exhibit this transition when many others do.…”