Skill Development, Applications and Cognition

Thomas G. Bowers, Ph.D.

New vs. Over Learned Skills

Gazzania et al. (1994) have demonstrated different patterns of activation of the brain in novel vs. familiar skills• New: Prefrontal cortex-premotor cortex-parietal

region• Old: Hippocampus-supplemental motor cortex-

occipital region• These results imply different processing is

involved

New vs. Over Learned Skills

Skill development appears to spring a log scale, as a power law

Some examples:• Isaac Asimov’s writing skills• Wrote more than 500 books

Ohlsson, 1992

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

100 200 300 400 500

Production of books showed a rapid and progressive decease in time

Kohler and Perkins, 1975

This pattern also appears to hold for less complex motor and performance tasks

Time to produce a cigar rapidly decreases with experience

Time to Produce a Cigar

0

5

10

15

20

25

3010,000

100,000

1,000,000

100,000,000

Again, this appears to be a power function, best fit on a log to log scale to note the linear degree of the relationship

Concept Acquisition

Early associative learning experiments attempted to understand conceptual processes• Similar• Dissimilar• Many other processes are likely

Concept Development

Early research by Hull in 1920, where subjects classified Chinese alphabet symbols by the radical element (or concept), but without any awareness

Concluded this was due to simple associative learning

Concept Development

However, other researchers noted that subjects engaged in conscious hypothesis testing

Bruner et al. developed this paradigm Current applications on the Category Test,

Wisconsin Card Sorting Test• Good measures of overall cerebral integrity

Concept Development

While concept development appears to happen gradually, for each individual subject it is an all or none function

Nevertheless, natural concepts also appear to have fuzzy boundaries

Language Acquisition

There has been controversy whether the acquisition of language is innate or learned

Major theorists are Skinner and Chomsky at opposite poles on this issue

Language Acquisition

Children implicitly learn complex rules of grammar, that are not even well known• Learning includes phonological rules and

syntactical rules• Not to mention semantic aspects of language

Language Acquisition

While this is felt to be uniquely human, there appears to be many examples of language-like production in animals

There does appear to a critical language acquisition period, up to about age twelve for humans

Language Acquisition

Chomsky (1965) first proposed that there are language universals, features true of all languages• For example, verb-noun differences

Language Acquisition

Animal language development• Research on apes• Limited vocal capacity• Some success in learning American Sign

Language (ASL)• Washoe

Language Acquisition

• Permack (1970s-1980s)• Chimp Sarah used symbols to make up

sentences• yes/no

• negatives

• class concepts - color, size, shape

• compound sentences

• quantifiers

• if - then and so on

Language Acquisition

• Some primates are now communicating with other primates with these methods