Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2001
Research on judgments of verbal learning has demonstrated that participants' judgments are unreli... more Research on judgments of verbal learning has demonstrated that participants' judgments are unreliable and often overconfident. The authors studied judgments of perceptual~motor learning. Participants learned 3 keystroke patterns on the number pad of a computer, each requiring that a different sequence of keys be struck in a different total movementtime. Practice trials on each pattern were either blocked or randomly interleaved with trials on the other patterns, and each participant wasasked, periodically, to predict his or her performance on a 24-hr test. Consistent with earlier findings, blocked practice enhanced acquisition but harmed retention. Participants, though, predicted better performance given blocked practice. These results augment research on judgments of verbal learning and suggest that humans,at their peril, interpret current ease of access to a perceptual-motorskill as a valid index of learning. Research into the subject of metacognition, or what we know about what we know,has received increasing attention over recent years (see, e.g., Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994; Nelson, 1992). Research focused on people's abilities to predict their own future recall or recognition of studied material has demonstrated that such predictions are frequently less than accurate, sometimes very wrong, and often overconfident. Such studies, however, have tended to focus on verbal-conceptual learning, rather than on the acquisition of motor skills. The current research concerns whether metacognitive predictions of one's later ability to perform a to-belearned motor skill are similarly open to error, or, given differences between motor skills and verbal learning, protected from sucherrors. To address this question, we chose a manipulation of the conditions of skill acquisition, blocked versus random practice, which has been shownto result in a dissociation between performance during training and performanceat a delay (e.g., Shea & Morgan, 1979). Blocked practice, in whichall trials of a particular to-belearned pattern are completed before practice is begun on another pattern, is compared with random practice, in whichtrials of the to-be-learned tasks are interleaved in a semirandom fashion. Blockedpractice usually leads to smaller error during practice than does random practice, but on retention tests the opposite pattern is generally obtained. Tothe extent, then, that acquisition performance during blocked and random practice is an imperfect index of future performance, the blocked-versus-random manipulation represents a challenging andpotentially diagnostic paradigm for the purposes of examining
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Papers by D. Simon