This investigation attempts to identify the most effective time to give explicit rules during the learning of a complex motor skill and adopts Reber, Lewis, Kassin and Cantor's (1980) timing strategy for giving explicit rules. Three experimental groups were used. An implicit group who received no explicit rules at all about the task. A delayed explicit group who received explicit rules exactly half way through the acquisition period and an explicit group who received the explicit rules at the onset of acquisition. However, Reber et al. used a cognitive skill whilst this experiment tests the generalisability of the results to motor skills.
The results did not reflect those of Reber et al. and only a learning effect was present. No evidence was found to suggest that any of the groups' performance was improved by giving explicit rules at the different times during acquisition. This may have been due to the nature of the task used and the type of rules given rather than specifically being a result of ungeneralisable findings. Therefore, the second experiment utilised the task and explicit rules of Verdolini-Marston and Balota (1994) which had been found to display
differences in implicit and explicit memory. The procedure and explicit timing strategy remained the same as the first experiment. Results similar to those of the first experiment were found. Again there was a significant learning effect reported. Generally only partial support for the third hypothesis, that reported explicit knowledge will be greater in subjects who practised the task with explicit rules was found. Discussion of the findings focuses upon the possible causes of the statistically non-significant results. The lack of findings are in the main attributed to the subjects use of the explicit rules and the fact that they may have ignored the rules. This could have been due to subjects not believing the
explicit rules to be important, therefore they were not salient. Also there is some concern that the task of the first experiment was not complex enough, thus again the subjects may not have perceived the rules as necessary in order to complete the task.