Cognitive Psychology and its Implications by John Anderson

Author:John Anderson [Anderson, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Worth Publishers
Published: 2009-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

General Characteristics of Skill Acquisition | 247

FIGURE 9.4 Examples of the

spatially transformed texts

used in Kolers’s studies of the

acquisition of reading skills. The

asterisks indicate the starting

point for reading. (From Kolers &

Perkins, 1975.)

reading-speed test, participants practiced on 200 pages of inverted text. Figure 9.5

provides a log-log plot of reading time against amount of practice. In this

figure, practice is measured as number of pages read. The change in speed with

practice is given by the curve labeled “Original training on inverted text.” Kolers

interspersed a few tests on normal text; data for these tests are given by the

curve labeled “Original tests on normal text.” We see the same kind of improve-

ment for inverted text as in Figures 9.2 and 9.3 (i.e., a straight-line function on

a log-log plot). After reading 200 pages, Kolers’s participants were reading at the

rate of 1.6 min per page—almost the same rate as that of participants reading

normal text.

A year later, Kolers had his participants read inverted text again. These data

are given by the curve in Figure 9.5 labeled “Retraining on inverted text.”

Participants now took about 3 min to read the first page of the inverted text.

Compared with their performance of 16 min on their first page a year earlier,

participants displayed an enormous savings, but it was now taking them almost

twice as long to read the text as it did after their 200 pages of training a year

earlier. They had clearly forgotten something. As the Figure 9.5 illustrates,

participants’ improvement on the retraining trials showed a log-log relation

between practice and performance, as had their original training. The same

level of performance that participants had initially reached after 200 pages of

248 | Expertise

16

Original training on inverted text

Retraining on inverted text

Original tests on normal text

Retraining tests on normal text

8

logarithmic scale)

4

2

Reading time (min,

1

0

2

4

8

16

32

64

128

256

Page number (logarithmic scale)

FIGURE 9.5 The results for readers in Kolers’s reading-skills experiment on two tests more

than a year apart. Participants were trained with 200 pages of inverted text in which pages of

normal text were occasionally interspersed. A year later, they were retrained with 100 pages

of inverted text, again with normal text occasionally interspersed. The results show the effect

of practice on the acquisition of the skill. Both reading time and number of pages practiced

are plotted on a logarithmic scale. (From Kolers, 1976. Copyright by the American Psychological Association.

Reprinted by permission.)

training was now reached after 50 pages. Skills generally show very high levels

of retention. In many cases, such skills can be maintained for years with no

retention loss. Someone coming back to a skill—skiing, for example—after many

years of absence often requires just a short warm-up period before the skill is

reestablished (Schmidt, 1988).

Poldrack and Gabrieli (2001) investigated the brain correlates of the

changes taking place as participants learn to read transformed text such as that

in Figure 9.4. In an fMRI brain-imaging study, they found increased activity in

the basal ganglia and decreased activation in the hippocampus as learning pro-

gressed. Recall from Chapters 6 and 7 that the basal ganglia are associated with

procedural knowledge, whereas the hippocampus is associated with declarative

knowledge. Similar changes in the activation of brain areas have been found by

Poldrack et al.

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