Attentional demands following perceptual skill training

Practicing simple visual casks indices substantial improvement. We investig ated whether increased efficiency is accompanied by automaticity and immuni ty to across-task interference. We found that although practice speeds orie ntation feature detection, if does not abolish susceptibility to interferen ce from introduction of concurrent central-letter identification, which fak es priority Yet following training with each task observers successfully ma naged to perform the tasks concurrently The effectiveness of separate train ing implies that the role of improved intertask coordination in achieving c oncurrent perfomance was minor. Indeed, even when initial training was conc urrent, improvement on the two casks was sequential, and the higher-priorit y (central) task was learned first. However, antomatic processing was not a ccomplished either, because increasing the difficulty of the higher-priorit y task interfered with performance of both tasks. What appears to be orches trated posttraining performance is actually mainly an emergent property of speeded initial processes rather than either eliminated bottlenecks or impr oved central executive management.