Ability determinants of complex skill acquisition: Effects of training protocol

The relationships between cognitive and psychomotor ability and complex task performance in a standard individual and dyadic training protocol were compared. Results supported the hypothesis that performance in the dyadic protocol depends more heavily on cognitive ability compared to performance in the individual protocol. Conversely, results also supported the hypothesis that performance in the individual protocol is more dependent on psychomotor ability. It was proposed that this differential dependency on abilities is due to the incorporation of additional social and cognitive factors to the design of the dyadic protocol to compensate for reductions in hands-on practice. Results also indicated that, for four out of five criterion measures, the stability of correlations between cognitive and psychomotor ability and complex task performance did not differ as a function of training protocol. However, for both protocols, the cognitive ability-performance relationship increased over training sessions as predicted by an interactive iterative learning phase model that extends Ackerman's (1988, 1992) theory of dynamic ability determinants. This increase was greater in the dyadic protocol for one of the criterion measures.