Autonomy support and preference-performance dissociation in choice-reaction time tasks

The purpose of the current study was threefold: (a) to examine the effects of participants having the autonomy to choose the practice order of two reaction time (RT) tasks - a choice-RT task and a Simon task - on performance, (b) to examine whether one order of practice is better than the other, and (c) to examine whether participants might choose a practice order that hinders their performance. The study was conducted online and participants completed the tasks on their own computer. Fifty-nine participants were randomly assigned into three groups: (a) autonomy - participants chose which task they would like to practice first, (b) choice-first - participants practiced the choice-RT task first, and (c) Simon-first - participants practiced the Simon task first. Out of these three groups we created an autonomy group (n = 17) and a no-autonomy (yoked) group (n = 17). All participants performed eight familiarization trials of each task, practiced 160 trials (8 blocks × 20 trials) of each task, and performed a post-test of 20 additional trials of each task after a three-minute rest. The main findings were that (a) participants in the autonomy group had faster RTs compared with participants in the no-autonomy group, (b) performing the choice-RT task first led to faster RTs compared with performing the Simon task first, and (c) nine of the 17 participants in the autonomy group chose to practice the Simon task first. The findings of this study suggest that providing participants with autonomy can lead to improved performance. However, there may be a dissociation between participants' preference of practice order and their performance.