Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland; Department of Child Psychiatry, Research Centre for Child Psychiatry, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; INVEST Research Flagship, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Jan;212:103211. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103211. Epub 2020 Nov 18.
Cognitive skill learning postulates strategy generation and implementation when people learn to perform new tasks. Here we followed self-reported strategy use and objective performance in a working memory (WM) updating task to reveal strategy development that should take place when faced with this novel task. In two pre-registered online experiments with healthy adults, we examined short-term strategy acquisition in a ca 20-30-minute adaptive n-back WM task with 15 task blocks by collecting participants' strategy reports after each block. Experiment 1 showed that (a) about half of the participants reported using a strategy already during the very first task block, (b) changes in selected strategy were most common during the initial task blocks, and (c) more elaborated strategy descriptions predicted better task performance. Experiment 2 mostly replicated these findings, and it additionally showed that compared to open-ended questions, the use of repeated list-based strategy queries influenced subsequent strategy use and task performance, and also indicated higher rates of strategy implementation and strategy change during the task. Strategy use was also a significant predictor of n-back performance, albeit some of the variance it explained was shared with verbal productivity that was measured with a picture description task. The present results concur with the cognitive skill learning perspective and highlight the dynamics of carrying out a demanding cognitive task.
认知技能学习假设人们在学习执行新任务时会生成和实施策略。在这里，我们根据自我报告的策略使用情况和在工作记忆 (WM) 更新任务中的客观表现，揭示了当面对这种新任务时应该发生的策略发展。在两项针对健康成年人的预先注册在线实验中，我们通过在每个任务块后收集参与者的策略报告，在一个大约 20-30 分钟的适应性 n 回 WM 任务中检查了短期策略获取，该任务有 15 个任务块。实验 1 表明：(a)大约一半的参与者在第一个任务块中就报告使用了一种策略；(b)在初始任务块中，选择的策略变化最为常见；(c)更详细的策略描述预测了更好的任务表现。实验 2 在很大程度上复制了这些发现，它还表明，与开放式问题相比，重复基于列表的策略查询的使用会影响后续策略使用和任务表现，并且还表明在任务期间策略实施和策略变更的频率更高。策略使用也是 n 回表现的一个重要预测指标，尽管它解释的一些方差与使用图片描述任务测量的语言生产力共享。目前的结果与认知技能学习的观点一致，并强调了执行具有挑战性的认知任务的动态性。
