Cognitive control strategies and adaptive performance in a complex work task.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Workplace Learning

Background:

• Adapting to new work tasks requires managing outdated knowledge and skills.
• Control strategies play a crucial role in successful task adaptation.
• Cognitive strategies can influence the ability to unlearn old rules and learn new ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of control strategies in task adaptation.
• To examine the effects of directed forgetting versus remembering outdated rules on performance.
• To assess the impact of different cognitive strategies on retaining and discarding task-specific knowledge.

Main Methods:

• Two experimental studies were conducted using an air traffic control simulation task.
• Participants learned an initial task, then adapted to a changed version after receiving strategy instructions.
• Cognitive strategies included directed forgetting, remembering old rules, or learning new rules (control).
• Discontinuous growth curve modeling was used to analyze performance changes.

Main Results:

• Directed forgetting improved performance after task rule changes (transition adaptation).
• No significant differences in relearning new rules were observed between groups.
• Directed forgetting and learning control groups showed reduced memory for outdated rules compared to the remembering group.

Conclusions:

• Directed forgetting is effective for adapting to new task demands.
• Cognitive strategies have both benefits (e.g., adaptation) and costs (e.g., memory for old rules).
• Findings have implications for training and skill management in dynamic work environments.