When vaccinating against information reduction works and when it does not work

Abstract

Practice not only affects how information is processed, but also which information is processed. The Information-Reduction Hypothesis (i.e. Haider & Frensch, 1996) holds that -with practice -irrelevant task information (i.e. information that is not logically needed to correctly perform the task) is discarded from processing. Recently, Gaschler and Frensch (2007) have demonstrated that Information Reduction is not affected by the frequency with which individual task confi gurations are presented: well-practiced and little-practiced irrelevant task confi gurations are discarded at the same point in time during practice; Information Reduction is thus an item-general phenomenon. These fi ndings suggest that Information Reduction is at least in part a consequence of top-down, voluntary control. In the present research, we ask how tasks can be constructed such that Information Reduction is avoided. Our resultsshow that item-general Information Reduction is observed even when it leads to severe processing costs (i.e. errors). On the whole, the present results are in line with models of skill acquisition incorporating top-down modulation (e.g. Haider & Frensch, 2002) and are incompatible with purely data-driven accounts of skill acquisition (

Information Reduction—More than meets the eye?

“…The Information Reduction account can also accommodate experimental evidence from the Alphabet Verification Task that suggested a topdown influence in strategy change during practice, since it can be applied to previously unseen stimuli of the same type (Gaschler & Frensch, 2009;Haider & Frensch, 1996). Instance theory cannot account for newly encountered material being processed in the same way as previously encountered stimuli.…”

“…The proposal is that, having become consciously aware that parts of a stimulus are irrelevant to the task, a decision is made to ignore the redundant information from then on, including for newly encountered stimuli of the same type (Gaschler & Frensch, 2009;Haider & Frensch, 1996). Haider and Frensch suggest that the aggregated data for each participant would indicate that the strategy is either abruptly and fully adopted for all stimuli at the same time or not adopted at all whereas theories of automaticity such as Instance theory (Logan, 1988), and the Component Power Laws theory (Rickard, 1997) suggest that a strategy switch from an algorithm to direct memory retrieval occurs individually for each stimulus at different time points during practice.…”

“…Another aim was to determine if "reducers" and "non-reducers" could be identified, by using changes in the stringlength effect and number of errors in the test block, and from a correlation between those measures. If Information Reduction is an abruptly and consistently adopted strategy, as has been suggested (Haider & Frensch, 2002;Gaschler & Frensch, 2009), then it should be possible to determine who is using it and who is not.…”

Intelligent Object Exploration

“…While successful in explaining some aspects of human skill acquisition, these models are less www.intechopen.com helpful for capturing exploration. However, research on information reduction (e.g., Haider & Frensch, 2002;Gaschler & Frensch, 2007, 2009 suggests that humans spontaneously explore object structure and parse objects into relevant and irrelevant parts -even in repetitive tasks with a narrow set of material that would be solvable by an instance-based approach. They generate knowledge about abstract structural properties of the task material which allows them to process novel and unfamiliar objects just as efficiently as highly practiced ones.…”

“…First, this training material allows for a strategy change towards faster exploration by discarding irrelevant aspects of the exploration task (refraining from stiffness tests on joints 2 and 3). Research on information reduction (i.e., Gaschler & Frensch, 2007, 2009) has argued that the discarding of irrelevant aspects of tasks from processing is a www.intechopen.com major basis of skill acquisition and of expertise acquisition. One can argue that by learning which aspects are relevant and which can be ignored, experts learn to use their time and cognitive resources very efficiently (in their domain of expertise).…”