Automatizing Alphabet Arithmetic: I. Is Extended Practice Necessary to Produce Automaticity?

Four experiments tested the necessity of extended practice in producing automaticity in an alphabet-arithmetic task in which subjects verified equations of the form A + 2 = C, asking whether C was two letters down the alphabet from A. Experiment 1 trained subjects on 40 alphabet-arithmetic facts for 12 sessions, demonstrating that extended practice was sufficient to produce automaticity. Experiment 2 produced the same degree of automaticity in a single session by having subjects rote memorize 6 facts, suggesting that extended practice is not necessary. Experiments 3 and 4 explored procedural differences between Experiments 1 and 2 to determine what was responsible for the large difference in the time required to develop automaticity. Experiment 3 compared learning rates with different numbers of facts (6, 12, and 18), and found learning rate to depend on the number of presentations of individual items, not on the number of items to be learned. Experiment 4 compared learning by performing the task (as in Experiment 1) with learning by remembering the facts (as in Experiment 2) and found no important differences between them. The results of all 4 experiments cannot be predicted by approaches that define automaticity in terms of resources or by listing properties, although they are readily predictable from theories that assume memory retrieval is the process that underlies automaticity.