Lecture notes
Lecture: Skill acquisition
- Module
- Cognitive Psychology
- Institution
- Aston University, Birmingham (Aston)
Lecture notes Skill Acquisition for BSc Psychology
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L5- Skill acquisitionProcedural knowledge vs declarative knowledge
Long term memory consists of:
- Declarative knowledge
- Procedural knowledge
Declarative knowledge (‘knowing that…’) typically is verbalizable, explicit (consciously
accessible) + comprises
- World knowledge (including word meaning + general facts)
- Episodic memory (autobiographical memory of events)
Procedural knowledge (‘knowing how…’) typically is NOT verbalizable + implicit (not
consciously accessible); it underlies skilled behaviour- i.e. the ability to quickly perform
various cognitive, perceptual + motor operations
The power law of skill acquisition
Skill acquisition follows a power law (Crossman,
1959)
Initially- learning progress is fast BUT then slows
more + more down
The power law applies to BOTH complex + simple
skills
Stages of skill acquisition
The acquisition of a skill proceeds through 3 major stages (Fitts, 1962 + Anderson, 1982):
- Cognitive stage= task is highly dependent on mental processing, frequent errors due
to a lack of skill + an overload of cognitive resources
- Associative stage= patterns of associations among actions are being learnt, action
patterns become more fluid, cognitive involvement decreases, error rate decreases +
errors largely caused by an overload of resources
- Autonomous stage= skill becomes increasingly automated + rapid, performance no
longer depends on cognitive resources, errors become rare + are mainly caused by
slips + lapses
Motor skills
Motor-skill learning can be defined as the acquisition of precisely adjusted movements
in which the amount, direction + duration of responding corresponds to variations in the
regulating stimuli (Adams, 1987)
- E.g. playing tennis, cricket etc
Any given motor skill has perceptual, cognitive + motor components
- E.g. texting requires coordinated finger movements as well as the (cognitive) ability
to transform the message to be sent
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