AUTOMATIZING ALPHABET ARITHMETIC .2. ARE THERE PRACTICE EFFECTS AFTER AUTOMATICITY IS ACHIEVED

Subjects made true/false judgments regarding alphabet-arithmetic (AA) statements like C + 2 = E (a true response because E is two steps beyond C in the alphabet). Logan and Klapp (1991) studied reaction time (RT) for novice and automatized performance on this task. The present experiments extended this analysis by testing interference between concurrent speech and AA verification at three levels of training: novice, automatized, and overtrained. At the novice level, RT depended on the digit addend and concurrent speech was disruptive. At the automatized level, RT was independent of addend and repetitive speech did not interfere. However, nonrepetitive speech (reciting the months of the year) interfered. At the overtrained level, RT was shorter, and interference from nonrepetitive speech was reduced, showing that there were practice effects after automaticity was achieved. These findings support an interpretation of automaticity in which memory retrieval is speeded during training. When retrieval is faster than algorithmic processing (e.g., alphabet counting), performance becomes automatized. With further training, memory retrieval becomes even faster, thereby reducing further the interference from concurrent tasks. We discuss the extent to which this account represents a general theory of automaticity.