The Interaction of Bottom-up and Top-down Consistency in the Development of Skills

Abstract

An experiment is reported that was conducted to examine the possible value of higher-order consistency in skill development. Subjects made judgments about ordinal properties of stimuli. The presence or absence of consistency was defined by the type of decision – consistent or varied decisions. In both decision conditions the stimuli were inconsistent at the individual stimulus level; however, subjects making consistent decisions concerning the stimuli could make use of consistent relationships among the stimuli. Subjects in the consistent decision were faster and more accurate at identifying target stimuli when compared with the inconsistent decision subjects. In addition to the quantitative differences, subjects receiving consistent decision training were qualitatively different in performance when compared to the inconsistent decision group. The pattern of results from the present experiment is quite consistent with previous memory/visual search investigations. The experiment supports the suggestion that local level (or stimulus based) consistency is not necessary for automatic process development if task relevant higher-order (or global) consistency can be identified and used by the trainees.

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