Five experiments addressed the effects of intercomponent consistency on skill acquisition in a class of cognitively demanding tasks requiring rapid integration of information and rapid application of rules. The role of consistency of external stimulus-to-rule linkage in facilitating learning and performing rule-based tasks was examined. After extensive consistent practice, subjects' performance was remarkably similar to performance observed in traditional perceptual learning tasks. This similarity suggests that mechanisms underlying perceptual learning (in visual search) and rule-based spatial learning are similar. Subjects who were trained such that consistent stimulus-to-rule association could be built up and strengthened with practice performed in a manner qualitatively and quantitatively different from subjects trained with inconsistent stimulus-to-rule relationships. This superiority of the consistent stimulus-to-rule-trained subjects over the inconsistent stimulus-to-rule subjects was even more exaggerated in dual-task situations. The data have implications for the understanding and training of skilled problem-solving tasks. When training affords development of subcomponent automatization of the problem-solving activity, the chance of memory overload is reduced. The results suggest one such trainable subcomponent-the perceptual/rule-based components.
