What is automaticity?

Introduction

Psychologists have found it useful to classify many aspects of human mental and motor performance as either “automatic” or “controlled.” Automatic processes are those that are carried out with ease, often requiring little or no attention. They can usually also be performed simultaneously with other tasks. Controlled processes, on the other hand, are more difficult and typically require a person’s full attention. Because they require so much attention, it is difficult to do anything else at the same time. Research on automaticity has outlined the conditions under which each type of processing can develop, as well as the conditions under which each works best.

Development

To illustrate automaticity and its development, consider the task of driving an automobile. Driving really involves many tasks, such as steering, looking out for traffic and pedestrians, obeying traffic lights and signs, changing speed, starting and stopping as traffic changes, and perhaps even discussing directions with a passenger. When first learning to drive, most people have difficulty doing all these things at once. When they see a stop sign, for example, they may have to decide consciously and deliberately which pedal to push to stop the car. For novice drivers, holding a conversation while driving is also difficult; if they pay attention to their driving, they will not hear what their passenger says, but if they listen and respond to their passenger, they may be endangering themselves and others. After some experience, however, the same person may be able to stop at a stop sign, check for oncoming traffic, and then proceed safely, all while holding up his or her end of a conversation.

What has changed to make reacting to a stop sign so much easier? Psychologists describe this phenomenon by saying that for a novice driver, the act of stopping at a stop sign is controlled, but through practice, it becomes automatic. Another activity in which this change occurs is reading, which is initially very difficult. With practice, however, a skilled reader no longer has to think about reading as a deliberate act. Instead, when the reader points his or her eyes at a printed page, he or she recognizes the words automatically.

Role of Mapping

Walter Schneider and Richard Shiffrin have done extensive research on how and under what conditions a process changes from controlled to automatic. The shift is a gradual one; to put it another way, automaticity is a matter of degree. From the examples above, it is clear that practice is a key ingredient in automaticity. Schneider and Shiffrin's research has highlighted the relevance of both the type and the degree of practice. They have described two kinds of practice: practice with consistent mapping, which promotes automaticity; and practice with varied mapping, which does not. The term “mapping” here refers to the relationship between stimulus and response, specifically which response is mapped onto each stimulus. Varied mapping refers to a situation in which a stimulus should sometimes be responded to and sometimes be ignored.

To return to the driving example, the difference between consistent and varied mapping can be illustrated by the difference between a stop sign and a yield sign. A stop sign involves consistent mapping, because the only response one should ever make to a stop sign is to stop; the sign never calls for any other response. Such is the hallmark of consistent mapping: there is only ever one response to make to a certain stimulus, and the stimulus never appears under circumstances in which it should be ignored, so that particular response is always (consistently) mapped to that particular stimulus. As a result of always stopping at stop signs, the response becomes automatic and can be executed without a pause in a conversation between the driver and a passenger. A yield sign, on the other hand, involves varied mapping, as its presence calls on the driver to make a decision in response to current conditions. If no traffic is coming, the yield sign means that the driver should continue without stopping; if there is other traffic coming, however, it means that the driver should stop.

To promote automatic processing, large amounts of practice with consistent mapping are needed. The mental or physical act thus practiced becomes automatic: easy to perform, even in conjunction with other activities, but very difficult to change, in part because it calls so little attention to itself. Automaticity has costs as well as benefits. One such cost is the large amount of practice required to develop automaticity. The inflexibility of automatic processes can also lead to inappropriate responses if the situation changes. As an example, imagine the difficulties faced by drivers in Sweden in the 1960s, when the nation switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. Drivers setting off to work on the morning after the change might well have found themselves driving on the (now) wrong side of the road. This is an extreme example, but any time that flexibility of response is required, controlled processes, though somewhat slower, may be better. Where flexibility is not a problem and quick response is needed, automaticity should be encouraged.

Dual-Task Methodology

Much of the research conducted on the development of automaticity has involved a letter-search task, in which a subject is seated before a computer monitor and told to look for a letter (or several different letters). The subject starts the task and begins seeing a series of letters on the screen. Whenever one of the items the subject is looking for appears, he or she must press a key on the computer keyboard. Usually subjects do many such trials, divided into two types. In some trials, they always search for the same letters, such as P and C; this is consistent mapping, because the stimulus and the expected response are always the same. In another series of trials, however, the letters they are searching for change every few trials. This is varied mapping. Note that if the letters P and C were used for the consistently mapped condition, they never appear as distractors (nontargets) in the varied mapping condition. The only time the subject sees them is when they are targets.

To test for the development of automaticity, a common approach is to employ a dual-task methodology. After considerable training at the task described above, typically twenty to thirty hours, a second task is added that the subject must perform at the same time. One task that has often been used is a category-search task, in which the subject is shown words as well as letters and must decide whether each word fits into a certain category (for example, “pieces of furniture”) while continuing to search for the letters. The typical finding is that subjects who are searching for the consistently mapped letters (P and C, in this example) will show little change in their reaction time, that is, the time between seeing the letter and responding to it. They will continue to make rapid, accurate responses to the letter-search task while also doing well at the category-search task. On the other hand, subjects who practiced the letter-search task with different letters, and thus experienced varied mapping, will suddenly become slower and less accurate, and they will do poorly in the category-search task as well. Just as the novice driver has to think about what to do when approaching a stop sign and will pause in a conversation, so the subject searching for varied targets will find sharing two tasks difficult.

One interesting example of the degree to which a task may become automatic was given by the concert pianist Charles Rosen. When practicing for a performance of a piano concerto that he knew well, he found that he became bored, so he began to read light novels while practicing. Reading is a relatively automatic task, which he could apparently combine easily with the (at least partially) automatic task of playing a well-practiced piece of music.

Role of Drilling

Upon examining many skills, it becomes evident that at least some aspects of most, if not all, of them are (and probably must be) automatic. Driving consists of many component skills—some automatic, such as steering and braking at stop signs, and some controlled, such as choosing at which corner to turn. The same is true in other areas as well. One reason for drills during sports practices is to increase automaticity so that responses are quick and reliable. In baseball, a base runner who had to stop to plan how to slide into base would have a short career. In education, a teacher must be able to recall the multiplication tables quickly and accurately to use them easily at each step in multiplying two three-digit numbers.

One practical issue raised by research on automaticity is the degree to which drilling is necessary in educational practice. At one time, educational practice relied heavily on large amounts of drilling. More recently, drilling has been seen as boring and irrelevant to education, promoting memorization rather than understanding. The truth is that drilling, or repetitive practice, is absolutely essential to gaining many of the fundamental skills necessary for deeper and more nuanced learning. Without enough drilling in algebra, for example, students find that their first course in calculus is mostly spent trying to figure out the algebra of the equations, with an accompanying reduction in understanding of the new material. Further research will provide more information about the optimum amount of drilling: enough so that the skill being practiced can be easily integrated into more complex tasks, but not so much that students are discouraged through boredom.

Evolution of Automaticity Study

In
The Principles of Psychology
(1890), William James, who was a principal founder of American psychology, described the fact that some mental acts are so easy that one hardly notices them, while others require careful thought and attention. It is exactly this distinction that finds modern expression in the distinction between automatic and controlled processes. It was not until the 1970s that experimental psychologists, including Schneider and Shiffrin, developed ways to study automatic processes and especially the acquisition of these processes.

The development of cognitive psychology, beginning in the 1950s, has shown the benefit to psychology of studying complex psychological processes by trying to identify and study their various components. By focusing on one part of the overall task at a time, more adequate experimental control can be gained and each component skill can more easily be studied. By knowing the conditions under which automaticity develops and using approaches such as dual-task methodology to help measure it, those parts of a complex task that are best performed automatically can be isolated. That isolation can lead to improvements in learning, because aspects of a complex skill that can be performed automatically can be subject to drilling. It also can help improve understanding of complex mental processes, such as reading, which can lead to the discovery of ways to help new learners understand what is required for mastery.

Contribution to Attention Studies

The study of automaticity has added to the general study of phenomena of attention. Fully automatic processes, such as well-trained letter searches in a Schneider and Shiffrin experiment or braking at a stop sign, seem to require almost no attention at all. A popular view of attention is the “resource” approach, suggested by Daniel Kahneman, which treats attention as a limited resource that can be assigned fairly flexibly. When a task to which one is paying attention is fairly easy (that is, uses few attentional resources), it can often be performed at the same time as another task. If a task requires considerable attentional resources, however, one is unable to perform another task at the same time. For example, driving in a thunderstorm or on icy roads makes conversation difficult for the driver, who will probably not even respond if a passenger tries to start a conversation. In this case, the driver must attend and respond in a controlled manner to many aspects of driving that are usually automatic. Thus, the concepts of automatic and controlled processes fit well with one of the major approaches to the study of attention.

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