Speed or accuracy instructions during skill learning do not affect the acquired knowledge

Vékony, Teodóra and Marossy, Hanna and Must, Anita and Vécsei, László and Janacsek, Karolina and Németh, Dezső (2020) Speed or accuracy instructions during skill learning do not affect the acquired knowledge. Cerebral Cortex Communications. ISSN 2632-7376

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Abstract

A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. Little is known about the effects of instructions on one critical aspect of skill learning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, the present study tests how pre-learning speed or accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. We trained two groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: one group focused on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected a strong instruction effect: accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, and speed instruction caused short reaction times. Despite the differences in the average reaction times and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning performance in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the two groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance. Moreover, multiple sessions with different instructions enabled the separation of competence from performance.

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