Skill Development, Applications and Cognition

1. Skill Development, Applications and Cognition Thomas G. Bowers, Ph.D.

2. 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

3. 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

4. Ohlsson, 1992 • Production of books showed a rapid and progressive decease in time

5. 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

6. 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

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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

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

16. 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

17. Language Acquisition • Some primates are now communicating with other primates with these methods