Instructions Don ’t Always Help Us To Do Better At A Task

By Emma Young You might hate following instructions on how to do something, but there’s no avoiding them. Training on everything from how to drive a car to read an X-ray starts with explicit instructions — whether verbal or written, as the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance point out. In fact, Luke Rosedahl at UC, Santa Barbara and colleagues write, “This practice is so widely accepted that scholarship primarily focuses on how to provide instructions, not whether these instructions help or not.” Now the team reports that for learning how to do well at certain tasks, they do not help at all. The team explored something that we do all the time: mentally sorting items into categories. They looked at two types of category sorting tasks. With a “rule-based” type, your best strategy for doing well is to learn and follow an explicit logical rule or rules. Let’s say you’re presented with a set of shapes, which you need to sort into two categories, and the rule is: all the yellow triangles belong to Category A, and everything else to Category B. (Rule-based tasks can get more complicated, but the rules are usually straightforward to explain and absorb.) Then there are “information-integration” tasks. To do well at these tasks, we have to learn to integrate bits of information that we find less straightforward to process together consciously, and rely more instead on “...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Decision making Source Type: blogs