Skill Acquisition

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Skill Acquisition

• Tuesday, 11/29/05

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Spatial Memory

• Route vs. Survey Maps
• Route map memory for a series of directions or
  paths through a particular environment.
• Survey map (cognitive map) a representation of
  pathways within the context of the entire
  surrounding environment.

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Tolman et al., (1946)
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Tolman et al., (1946)
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Radial Maze
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(No Transcript)
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• Landmarks distinctive structures in the
  environment that can be used as reference points
  in spatial memory.

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• Spatial memory tends to first utilize route maps,
  but with experience develops and utilizes survey
  maps.
• Survey maps tend to provide more useful
  navigation information than do route maps.

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Schemas in Spatial Memory

• Schemas can influence spatial memory by
• Facilitating organization
• Distorting recall

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Acquisition of Motor Skills

• All motor skills contain perceptual, motor, and
  cognitive components. The relative contribution
  of each component depends on the particular motor
  skill.

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• Stages of skill acquisition
• Cognitive stage
• Associative stage
• Autonomous stage

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1. The Cognitive Stage

• When faced with a problem, the learner must first
  organize a solution.
• The learner develops goals, and engages in
  behaviors that lead to achieving the goals.
• Often times the learner must engage in subgoaling.

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• The cognitive stage is marked by excessive
  cognitive involvement, often in the form of
  instruction rehearsal.

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2. The Associative Stage

• As learners become more practiced at a skill,
  they begin to recognize solutions without
  thinking through the problem.
• The transition from the cognitive to the
  associative stage is represented as a transition
  from problem solving to retrieval.

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Quiz 4

• Recall of happy memories is better when happy,
  and recall of sad memories is better when sad.
  What is the name of this phenomenon?
• Reconstructed memories are a combination of what
  two types of information?