Investigation of procedural skills degradation from different modalities

Can we help people forget less by knowing how they learn? Can we decrease forgetting by modifying what they learn? These have been long-standing questions in applied cognitive psychology. This paper reports a study designed to investigate procedural skills degradation in a set of spreadsheet tasks. The task can be taught and performed as knowledge and skills that are declarative or procedural, and perceptual-motor or cognitive. To examine the effect of these characteristics on learning and forgetting, one group of participants used key-based commands to complete the task, and the other group used a novel mouse and menus to do the task. Participants were able to learn the task well in four learning sessions. Retention intervals (6-day or 18-day) showed clear effects on the amount of forgetting. This paradigm can measure forgetting in terms of modalities and skill types. We found evidence that the menu mode was not better than keystrokes. Furthermore, the modalities showed different effects on forgetting in terms of retention intervals.