Skill Acquisition, Individual Differences, and Human Abilities

Abstract

The nature of individual differences in novel and practiced performance on skill acquisition tasks is considered from an information processing framework that incorporates concepts derived from automatic/controlled processing and attentional resource perspectives. A set of skill acquisition experiments graphically demonstrate changes in individual differences parameters via manipulating task characteristics of 1) information processing consistency, 2) memory load, 3) stimulus novelty. A further experiment illustrates the effects of novel, but consistent information processing demands on abilities, within a transfer-of-training paradigm. Results are discussed in the context of ability/skill relations.