Study title

Recent evidence indicates that when a stimulus is met repeatedly in a particular task, many of the mental processes which were initially needed to process it are by-passed. Prior encounters with the stimulus lead to the results of those processes being stored and automatically retrieved when the stimulus recurs. This process, known as response learning, is one aspect of the practice effect and forms the focus of this project. However, the response learning account faces a problem. How can it explain the fact that we may have alternative practiced responses to the same stimulus according to the task in which we are currently engaged? For example, if we are playing basketball and the ball is moving towards us at chest height then we would catch it, but we would not do this when playing football. This suggests that the stimulus interacts with a person's mental set to carry out a particular task to determine what responses are retrieved. This project will investigate this interaction through a series of studies comparing the extent of response learning in a situation where people are only exposed to a single task with that when they are exposed to alternative tasks using the same stimuli.