Reflective cognition as a secondary task

Our hypothesis is that reflective cognition is necessary to achieve expert level performance in certain skills, and that reflective cognition can be seen as a secondary task in skill acquisition. To investigate to what extent people use and acquire complex skills and strategies in the domains of reasoning about others and natural language use, an experiment was conducted in which it was beneficial for participants to have a mental model of their opponent, and to be aware of pragmatic inferences. Individual differences in the use of complex skills and strategies, that support our hypothesis, were found.