Speed or Accuracy Instructions During Skill Learning do not Affect the Acquired Knowledge

A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. Little is known about the effects of instructions on one critical aspect of skill learning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, the present study tests how prelearning speed or accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. We trained 2 groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: one group focused on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected a strong instruction effect: accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, and speed instruction caused short reaction times (RTs). Despite the differences in the average RTs and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning performance in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the 2 groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance. Moreover, multiple sessions with different instructions enabled the separation of competence from performance.

Skill learning can be independent of speed and accuracy instructions

A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. However, a little is known about its effect on one critical aspect of skill leaning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, how pre-learning speed vs. accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. Here, we trained two groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: one group focusing on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected strong instruction effect: accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, while speed instruction caused short reaction times. Despite the differences in the average reaction times and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the two groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance.

The Mere Exposure Instruction Effect

The mere exposure effect refers to the well-established finding that people evaluate a stimulus more positively after repeated exposure to that stimulus. We investigated whether a change in stimulus evaluation can occur also when participants are not repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, but are merely instructed that one stimulus will occur frequently and another stimulus will occur infrequently. We report seven experiments showing that (1) mere exposure instructions influence implicit stimulus evaluations as measured with an Implicit Association Test (IAT), personalized Implicit Association Test (pIAT), or Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), but not with an Evaluative Priming Task (EPT), (2) mere exposure instructions influence explicit evaluations, and (3) the instruction effect depends on participants’ memory of which stimulus will be presented more frequently. We discuss how these findings inform us about the boundary conditions of mere exposure instruction effects, as well as the mental processes that underlie mere exposure and mere exposure instruction effects.

The Composition of Digital Wushu Instruction Court

Hard to learn and easy to forget are real problems in Wushu practice. Digital Wushu instruction court as the computer assisted technology increases alternative teaching method in Wushu teaching activities. Digital Wushu instruction court includes hardware system and software system. Hard ware is mainly composed by digital floor, digital periphery, digital terminal and communication platform. Software includes picture, video, music, text, motion analysis system and so on. The purpose of digital Wushu instruction court is to cultivate students’ interests to Wushu, increase Wushu instruction effect, and develop their self-learning ability.