Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several canonical experimental paradigms (serial reaction task, mxn task, etc.) have been proposed to study the typicalbehavioural phenomenon in sequential key-press tasks. However, not much work has been done on studying motor se-quencing in grid-navigation tasks. In this work, using empirical examinations, we systematically show grid-navigationtask as an instance of skill learning paradigm. The participants performed Grid-Sailing Task (GST), which required nav-igating (by executing sequential key-presses) a 5x5 grid from start to goal position while using a particular key-mappingamong the 3 cursor movement directions and the 3 keyboard buttons. We employ two different experiments to argue forthe learning of cognitive strategies as well as motor sequences. By rejecting the motor adaptation argument and validatingthe law of practice, we characterize GST as a skill learning task. We further argue for advantages of GST as a general,canonical task over others for use in skill learning studies.