Behavioral indicators in learning to distinguish between short time intervals

As part of a study of the process of acquiring a new skill, this paper compared groups of participants demonstrating varying degrees of skill acquisition and improvement of a skill formed using the “Yes/No” psychophysical task. It was assumed that when learning a new skill, the participants could acquire new experience at different rates and, thus, after the same number of behavioral acts of interaction with the task, have different degrees of formation of the new functional system, which would be manifested in differences in response time, “sensitivity index” d’, and decision criterion β. One group of participants (N = 28, 18 to 45 years, median 19 years, 7 males, 21 females) in the study were trained to discriminate between short time intervals presented in the visual modality in a single session, while a second group (N = 51, 18 to 32 years, median 22 years, 27 males, 24 females) underwent similar training in two sessions spaced 24 hours apart. It was shown that such effects as bias in the decision criterion score β, its independence from the “sensitivity” score d’, and longer time for the response category “No, there was no difference” compared to the response category “Yes, there was a difference” were observed only in the groups of higher-performing participants (demonstrating the skill without prior training) compared to other groups of participants (in all cases at p ≤ 0.05). These phenomena were not observed in the groups of lower performing participants (those who did not acquired skill and those who acquired skill as they progressed through the experiment). The obtained results are interpreted from the standpoint of the system-evolutionary approach on the basis of ideas about systemogenesis and the number of degrees of freedom of neuron and organism observed at the stage of mismatch and after the completion of the process of systemogenesis.