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

New vs. Over Learned Skills w 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 w Skill development appears to spring a log scale, as a power law w Some examples: Isaac Asimov’s writing skills Wrote more than 500 books

Ohlsson, 1992 w Production of books showed a rapid and progressive decease in time

Kohler and Perkins, 1975 w This pattern also appears to hold for less complex motor and performance tasks w Time to produce a cigar rapidly decreases with experience

Time to Produce a Cigar w 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 w Early associative learning experiments attempted to understand conceptual processes Similar Dissimilar Many other processes are likely

Concept Development w Early research by Hull in 1920, where subjects classified Chinese alphabet symbols by the radical element (or concept), but without any awareness w Concluded this was due to simple associative learning

Concept Development w However, other researchers noted that subjects engaged in conscious hypothesis testing w Bruner et al. developed this paradigm w Current applications on the Category Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test Good measures of overall cerebral integrity

Concept Development w While concept development appears to happen gradually, for each individual subject it is an all or none function w Nevertheless, natural concepts also appear to have fuzzy boundaries

Language Acquisition w There has been controversy whether the acquisition of language is innate or learned w Major theorists are Skinner and Chomsky at opposite poles on this issue

Language Acquisition w 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 w While this is felt to be uniquely human, there appears to be many examples of language-like production in animals w There does appear to a critical language acquisition period, up to about age twelve for humans

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

Language Acquisition w 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