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 learn to distinguish task-relevant from task-re dundant information and to ignore task-irrelevant information. In 2 experim ents, the authors examined whether degree of information reduction can be d irectly affected by task instruction. Participants verified alphabetic arit hmetic tasks containing task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. Part icipants were asked to optimize their accuracy or their speed of performanc e 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 (fi rst speed, then accuracy). In addition, time duration of Stimulus presentat ion under speed instruction was systematically reduced over practice in Exp eriment 2. Results showed that amount of information reduction was affected by instructions, suggesting that the process of information reduction is a t least partially under voluntary control.