Dyadic versus individual training protocols: Loss and reacquisition of a complex skill.

Abstract

Winfred Arthur, Jr., and Eric Anthony DayTexas AM Winston Bennett, Jr., Armstrong Laboratory, HumanResources Directorate, U.S. Air Force, Brooks Air Force Base,Texas.This research was sponsored under contract to Winfred Ar-thur, Jr., from the U.S. Air Force Armstrong Laboratory, HumanResources Directorate, Technical Training Research Division,Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. The views expressed herein arethose of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the officialposition or opinion of their respective organizations.We thank the following individuals for their assistance incollecting the data: Arlette DeCuir, Julie Goodwin, John Lane,Robyn Maldegen, Michael Miller, Laura Thomas, and TravisTubre.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressedto Winfred Arthur, Jr., Department of Psychology, Texas A&MUniversity, College Station, Texas 77843-4235. Electronic mailmay be sent via Internet to wea@psyc.tamu.edu.been lost. Likewise, disaster teams may go years withoutevacuating residents from affected areas, managing evacu-ation routes, and rescuing survivors, and yet they are ex-,pected to perform at high proficiency levels should thesituation arise.One of the most pervasive weaknesses of the skill-lossliterature is the lack of attention given to the phenomenaof skill acquisition (Arthur, Bennett, Stanush, & McNelly,in press). R. A. Schmidt and Bjork (1992), for example,criticized the educational and training literature for treat-ing learning (i.e., skill acquisition) and retention (the op-posite of which is skill loss) as two separate phenomenathat have been studied independently by different scien-tists using different methods in different laboratories. Forinstance, they showed that those protocols that maximizeskill acquisition may not necessarily lead to the best reten-tion compared with protocols that degrade speed of acqui-sition. Thus, these authors argued that acquisition andretention are really inseparable and need to be consideredtogether in investigations of skill acquisition. Conse-quently, the objective of our study was to evaluate andcompare the effectiveness and efficiency of a dyad-basedtraining protocol with that of a standard, individual-basedprotocol in terms of complex skill acquisition, loss, andreacquisition after a nonpractice, posttraining interval.The performance task used in our study was the videogame Space Fortress (Human Engineering Laboratory,Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), which has astrong history as an excellent research tool in the area of