Player aid
Keep the rules of the session in view without spending a thinking page on them.
Variants
- default
Grounding
Helps: when a session uses conventions worth keeping in view but not worth memorising; external stores free working memory in lab tasks, and reference aids are used to cut omissions in procedural work, though the evidence is mixed and large checklist studies in surgery disagree
Backfires: when the aid replaces judgement, or stands in for conventions the person never learns, since people remember less of what they expect to be able to look up
- BKeeping task-relevant information in a stable, visible external store, rather than in working memory, improves performance on the concurrent task, at the cost of weaker memory for the offloaded content.Gilbert (2015), Storm & Stone (2015), Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011), Risko & Gilbert (2016), Meyerhoff, Grinschgl, Papenmeier & Gilbert (2021), Hesselmann (2020)
- CA checklist or reference card kept at hand reduces omissions in multi-step or rule-governed tasks compared with relying on memory.Haynes et al. (2009), Urbach, Govindarajan, Saskin, Wilton & Baxter (2014), Reason (2002), Hales & Pronovost (2006)