When Practice Fails to Reduce Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot: The Case of Cognitive Load

Abstract

Practice improves performance on a first-person shooter task (FPST), increasing accuracy and decreasing racial bias. But rather than simply promoting cognitively efficient processing, we argue that the benefits of practice on a difficult, cognitively demanding task like the FPST rely, at least in part, on resource-intensive, cognitively effortful processing. If practice-based improvements require cognitive resources, then cognitive load should compromise the value of practice by depriving trained participants of the cognitive resources on which they depend. This experiment shows that inducing cognitive load eliminates the benefits of training, leading to an increase in racial bias, as predicted.