A Theory of the Acquisition of Speed-Skill∗

Crossman, E. R. F. W.

doi:10.1080/00140135908930419

Cited by 460 publications

(301 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(1 reference statement)

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“…Of course, most of the relevant data comes from tasks learnt for short periods of time in the laboratory. However, it is worth highlighting one classic study reporting performance at an industrial cigar rolling task 22 . Workers were included who had produced in excess of ten million cigars over seven years of work.…”

Section: Basic Properties Of Skill Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports

2009

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Section: Basic Properties Of Skill Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports

2009

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“…Power-function speedup with practice has been observed across a wide variety of tasks, including retrieval of facts from memory (Pirolli & Anderson, 1985;Rickard, Healy, & Bourne, 1994), repeating sentences (MacKay, 1982), proving geometry theorems (Neves & Anderson, 1981), learning editing routines (Moran, 1980), rolling cigars (Crossman, 1959), and evaluating logic circuits (Carlson, Sullivan, & Schneider, 1989). In fact, power-function speedup appears to be so ubiquitous that Newell and Rosenbloom (1981) conferred to it the status of a scientific law.…”

Section: The Power Law Of Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Bending the power law: A CMPL theory of strategy shifts and the automatization of cognitive skills.

Rickard¹

1997

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

213

471

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The shift with practice from use of generic, multistep problem-solving strategies to fast and relatively effortless memory-based strategies, was explored in 2 experiments using pseudoarithmetic tasks. A complete transition to the memory strategy occurred by about the 60th exposure to each problem. The power law of practice did not hold in the overall data for either the mean or the standard deviation of response latency, but it did hold within each strategy (algorithm or retrieval). Learning was highly specific to the practiced problems. These results constitute the 1st clear demonstration of a skill for which the power law does not apply overall. The results do not support the instance theory of automatization (G. D. Logan, 1988) but are consistent with an alternative component 12ower laws (CMPL) theory that assumes that because of intrinsic attentional limitations, only 1 strategy can be executed at a time.One of the fundamental processes of human skill acquisition is the strategy shift with practice from use of generic, multistep procedures to direct retrieval of answers from memory (Ashcraft, 1992;Lemaire & Siegler, 1995;Logan, 1988;Reder and Ritter, 1992;Rickard & Bourne, 1996;Siegler, 1988). Examples are numerous in both the natural environment and the laboratory. Foreign vocabulary learning (Crntcher, 1989), spelling (Siegler, 1986), acquisition of linguistic rules (Bourne, Healy, Rickard, & Parker, 1997;Healy & Sherrod, 1994), and visual numerosity judgments (Lassaline & Logan, 1993; Palmed, 1997) can all reflect this type of strategy shift. Basic single-digit arithmetic is probably the most familiar example. During initial stages of learning, children often use counting procedures that can require 10 s or longer to execute. With sufficient practice, however, they learn to retrieve answers to individual problems directly from memory. By adulthood, the directretrieval strategy typically yields answers in about a second (Siegler, 1988).This article evaluates two candidate accounts of adult skill acquisition, strategy shifting, and the development of automaticity in these and related skill domains, with a current focus on mental calculation. 1 The models under comparison make diametrically opposing claims about two fundamental properties of human information processing. The instance theory of automatization (Logan, 1988) Special thanks to Lyle Bourne and Alice Healy for their many thoughtful comments. Special appreciation to Gordon Logan for his helpful comments.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Timothy C. Rickard, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0109. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to trickard@ucsd.edu. 288 that direct retrieval from memory is automatic and executable in parallel with a variety of other more complex processes, such as multistep procedures or algorithms. The alternative model developed in this article assumes that memory retrieval is strongly dependent on attention and that o...

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“…Conducting a longitudinal study to measure the user's learning curve is costly, particularly if the study employs more than a few participants. It is possible to use the power law of learning (regression) to extract future performance (Crossman, 1959). By the nature of regression analysis, however, a reliable estimate of the exponent of the learning curve still requires a large number of sessions.…”

Section: Evaluation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In search of effective text input interfaces for off the desktop computing

Zhai¹,

Kristensson²,

Smith³

2005

Interacting with Computers

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It is generally recognized that today's frontier of HCI research lies beyond the traditional desktop computers whose GUI interfaces were built on the foundation of display-pointing device-full keyboard. Many interface challenges arise without such a physical UI foundation. Text writingranging from entering URLs and search queries, filling forms, typing commands, to taking notes and writing emails and chat messages-is one of the hard problems awaiting for solutions in off-desktop computing. This paper summarizes and synthesizes a research program on this topic at the IBM Almaden Research Center. It analyzes various dimensions that constitute a good text input interface; briefly reviews related literature; discusses the evaluation methodology issues of text input; presents the major ideas and results of two systems, ATOMIK and SHARK; and points out current and future directions in the area from our current vantage point. q

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A Theory of the Acquisition of Speed-Skill∗

Cited by 460 publications

References 4 publications

Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports

Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports

Bending the power law: A CMPL theory of strategy shifts and the automatization of cognitive skills.

In search of effective text input interfaces for off the desktop computing

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