Information reduction during skill acquisition: The influence of task instruction.

H. Haider and P. A. Frensch's (1996) information reduction hypothesis holds that with practice, people leam to distinguish task-relevant from task-redundant information and to ignore task-irrelevant information. In 2 experiments, the authors examined whether degree of information reduction can be directly affected by task instruction. Participants verified alphabetic arithmetic tasks containing task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. Participants were asked to optimize their accuracy or their speed of performance throughout the entire experiment or to optimize accuracy for half of the experiment and speed for the other half of the experiment or vice versa (first speed, then accuracy). In addition, time duration of stimulus presentation under speed instruction was systematically reduced over practice in Experiment 2. Results showed that amount of information reduction was affected by instructions, suggesting that the process of information reduction is at least partially under voluntary control. Think of two people, one an experienced user of computer software and the other an inexperienced user, both trying to install some new computer software. During the installation process, a number of messages are displayed on the screen, some of which need to be attended to and some of which may be safely ignored. Whereas the inexperienced user is likely to thoroughly read through all messages displayed on the screen, the skilled user very likely pays attention