When faced with uncertainty, human observers maximize performance by integrating sensory information with learned task-relevant regularities. Does this behavior similarly occur in social settings? In this paper, we explore how reward-seeking behavior in an intergroup context is affected by readily available but task-irrelevant social information (in the form of group membership) when task-relevant reward information can be learned over time. Across two experiments, we show that participants learned and utilized task-relevant regularities to inform their choices. We also show that human observers are not universally biased towards utilizing social information in all settings––participants learned to disregard social information when not relevant to the task at hand. However, learning about the utility of social information (Experiment 2) had a long-term influence on observers’ ability to subsequently learn and utilize available sources of information. Real-world intergroup contexts typically encompass situations and stimuli that have been previously experienced by the observer. Our findings highlight the powerful influence of learning in such contexts.

Explicit strategies, drawing on working memory and executive function, play an important role in motor learning and adaptation. Here, using a visuomotor rotation task in which participants explicitly reported their aim angle, we examined the influence of task complexity on explicit learning, with an emphasis on capacity limitations that influence the number of unique solutions that observers are able to keep in memory. We found that increasing target set size (from 1 to 4 targets) resulted in slower learning and slower RTs, likely due to a combination of algorithmic simulation and memory retrieval strategies. However, when participants were required to learn four unique target-rotation pairs simultaneously, we observed constant RTs and a similar rate of learning across rotation magnitude, in line with participants explicitly memorizing and retrieving unique solutions for each target. These findings suggest that participants may adopt different explicit strategies depending on the complexity of the sensorimotor task.