How to select two individual points without selecting other edges? I am a newbie in Blender, sorry for any possible noob question.

Was watching a youtube tutorial about making hands.
Everything was functioning well, until the point where he selected two vertices and merged them together.

In the video, he selected two vertices and then alt-m to merge them together, without the edges and other vertices in between being selected and merged together.
However, when I tried to do the same, the points in between is automatically selected and then also merged together, created an unwanted result (eg. If I tried to select two vertices in a v-shaped plane, the other vertice will also be selected).

Is there a setting or a hotkey where I can prevent this from happening? Thank you.

Video for reference: Blender Character Modeling 5 of 10
Select Mouse, i.e. the mouse button used for selection (see User Preferences), will call the Activate/Select operator which, by default, selects one vertex while deselecting the rest.

Shift + Select Mouse will call Activate/Select and toggle selection of vertices instead of deselecting other vertices, allowing you to multi-select individual vertices.

If a path of vertices is being selected when you attempt to multi-select, you're using Ctrl + Select Mouse which calls Pick Shortest Path, the operator that selects all vertices in a path between two individual vertices.