Skill Development, Applications and Cognition

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Skill Development, Applications and Cognition

• Thomas G. Bowers, Ph.D.

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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

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New vs. Over Learned Skills

• Skill development appears to spring a log scale,
  as a power law
• Some examples
• Isaac Asimovs writing skills
• Wrote more than 500 books

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Ohlsson, 1992

• Production of books showed a rapid and
  progressive decease in time

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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

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Time to Produce a Cigar

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

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Concept Acquisition

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Language Acquisition

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

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Language Acquisition

• Animal language development
• Research on apes
• Limited vocal capacity
• Some success in learning American Sign Language
  (ASL)
• Washoe

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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

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Language Acquisition

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