THE IMPACT OF INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES ON MESSAGE-PRODUCTION SKILL ACQUISITION

Skill acquisition follows a pattern of rapid improvement early on, fol lowed by decreasing performance increments as the skill continues to b e practiced, a pattern captured by the ''power law of practice,'' (P = BNalpha). The purpose of these studies was to extend previous researc h by investigating the impact of individual differences on the course of adult communicative-skill acquisition. In Study I, participants lea rned a sequence for describing geometric arrays and then executed 90 p erformance trials. Individual differences in working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and psychomotor ability were assessed . It was found that counter to expectations, speed of information proc essing was negatively correlated with, overall learning rate and that psychomotor ability was related to asymptotic performance. In Study 2, employing a more complex communication task, speed of information pro cessing was positively correlated with learning rate, working memory c apacity predicted initial performance speed, and psychomotor ability w as associated with asymptotic performance.