Cognitive skill learning postulates strategy
generation and implementation when people learn to perform new tasks. Here we
followed self-reported strategy use and objective performance in a working
memory (WM) updating task to reveal strategy development that should take place
when faced with this novel task. In two pre-registered online experiments with
healthy adults, we examined short-term strategy acquisition in a ca
20-30-minute adaptive n-back WM task with 15 task blocks by collecting
participants’ strategy reports after each block. Experiment 1 showed that (a)
about half of the participants reported using a strategy already during the
very first task block, (b) changes in selected strategy were most common during
the initial task blocks, and (c) more elaborated strategy descriptions
predicted better task performance. Experiment 2 mostly replicated these
findings, and it additionally showed that compared to open-ended questions, the
use of repeated list-based strategy queries influenced subsequent strategy use
and task performance, and also indicated higher rates of strategy
implementation and strategy change during the task. Strategy use was also a
significant predictor of n-back performance, albeit some of the variance it
explained was shared by verbal productivity that was measured with a picture
description task. The present results concur with the cognitive skill learning
perspective and highlight the dynamics of carrying out a demanding cognitive
task.