Bringing together the psychometric and strategy worlds: Predicting adaptivity in a dynamic task

ABSTRACT There are two traditional approaches to the study of individual differences in cogni-tive skill. One assumes that people differ in the strategies that they we. The other assumes that all people use the same strategies or processes but differ in one or more performance parameters-affecting how the ~ processes are executed (e.g.. speed memory capacity). This chapter explores another possibility. that people differ in how well they adaptively shift strategies in response to changing features of the task environment. To test this, we examined the performance of 57 participants in a variant of the Kanfer·Ackerman Air Traffic Control Task (Kanfer and Ackerman 1989), a dynamic task in which features of the environment frequently change. We found that. while most participants adap~ed their strategy selections in response to our manipulations of the task environment, not all participants were equally adaptive.- Furthermore, using the CM1 4 (Kyllonen 1993), a cognitive assessment battery, we were able to determine what cognitive sub-skills were associated with adaptiveness. In this context, we found that inductive reasoning slcill (and not working memory, declarative learning. procedural learning, or processing speed) was associated with adaptiveness to our specific manipulations, and to the general dynamic Character of the air tnffic control (ATC) task