Consistently mapped but consistently demanding: Predicting skilled performance.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Expertise Research
• Skill Acquisition

Background:

• Task performance differences are linked to cognitive abilities and practice.
• Consistent stimulus-response mappings facilitate task automatization in simple tasks.
• Complex tasks may maintain the influence of fluid abilities despite training.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how stimulus-response consistency affects cognitive abilities in complex learning.
• To determine if practice changes the relationship between cognitive abilities and performance on complex tasks.
• To extend prior research on skill acquisition and expertise with a novel complex task.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a large sample (N=818) of university and community participants.
• Employed an extensive cognitive ability battery and a novel complex learning task.
• Manipulated stimulus-response consistency and controlled other task features, analyzed with multigroup structural equation modeling.

Main Results:

• Variable mapping impaired performance but did not alter the underlying cognitive abilities required.
• Fluid intelligence was the primary predictor of performance on both consistent and variable tasks.
• Completion time was predicted by fluid intelligence and processing speed.

Conclusions:

• Task complexity can override the benefits of stimulus-response consistency.
• Cognitive abilities, particularly fluid intelligence, remain influential in complex tasks despite practice.
• Findings suggest that cognitive determinants of performance are robust in complex learning environments.