The role of awareness of repetition during the development of automaticity in a dot-counting task

Abstract

This study examined whether being aware of the repetition of stimuli in a simple numerosity task could aid the development of automaticity. The numerosity task used in this study was a simple counting task. Thirty-four participants were divided into two groups. One group was instructed that the stimuli would repeat many times throughout the experiment. The results showed no significant differences in the way automatic processing developed between the groups. Similarly, there was no correlation between the point at which automatic processing developed and the point at which participants felt they benefitted from the repetition of stimuli. These results suggest that extra-trial features of a task may have no effect on the development of automaticity, a finding consistent with the instance theory of automatisation.

The role of autobiographical memory in competence need satisfaction

“…Although the RAT does include a set of moderately difficult "control" items (McFarlin & Blascovich, 1984), there was concern that merely completing the task would influence participants' perceptions of competence. Thus, for the neutral condition, participants completed a dot counting task where they were instructed to count and enter the number of dots they saw on the computer screen (Speelman & Shadbolt, 2018). They received 10 sets of randomly placed dots and were not given any information regarding their performance.…”

“…They received 10 sets of randomly placed dots and were not given any information regarding their performance. Similar to other counting tasks (e.g., Marsh, Bink, & Hicks, 1999;Swift & Peterson, 2018;Speelman & Shadbolt, 2018), this task was not intended to be particularly competence-frustrating or competence-satisfying. All competence satisfaction manipulation tasks can be found in Appendix B.…”