Training Proactive Control Strategies: Transfer Between Tasks

Abstract: People are very good at learning from instructions. Whenever a person receives a novel instruction, she can proactively build a plan in her head and then execute it with a very high accuracy. This proactive planning strategy gets faster over time. Here we test whether training people on proactive strategies will improve their abilities on other tasks that benefit from proactive approaches. People were trained on rapid instruction task learning (RITL; e.g. Cole, Laurent, & Stocco, 2013), with or without having to plan their approach to solving the problem. They were then tested on a task switching task. Preliminary results show that the proactive approach does not transfer to task switching. This indicates that training people on a forced proactive strategy may not improve their spontaneous proactive behavior.