The learning of perceptual-motor skills by men and machines and its relationship to training

Abstract

Gaines, B. R. (1972). The learning of perceptual-motor skills by men and machines and its relationship to training.Instructional Science 1, 263-312. The learning of perceptual-motor skills by men and machines and its relationship to training Brian R. Gaines Department of Electrical Engineering ScienceUniversity of Essex AbstractAs part of a program of research on-the feasibility and utility of automated training devices, "teaching machines," for perceptual-motor skills, a comparative study has been made of human operators and computer-simulated learning-machines learning a high order tracking task under a variety of conditions.One outcome of this study has been to suggest, through the similarity of learning phenomena shown by men and machines, that there are important characteristics of learning which may be divorced from the particular physical realisation of a learning device, and hence are entirely conditioned by the learning environment. This has practical implications for training and for the evaluation of training devices, since a general theory of learning phenomena may be developed and standard learning artifacts may be used in the optimization of training techniques.This paper analyses training as a control problem in the state-space of the adaption-automaton of the trainee, and develops a strategy for training based upon the epistemological problems of the trainee. A specific feedback training controller for a class of tracking skills is then outlined and its behaviour investigated theoretically and experimentally. Finally, a major experiment involving the training of both humans and learning machines under a variety of conditions is described and analysed.

Living in an Uncertain Universe

“…I did so by having the stochastic Perceptron imagine itself with the input specified, taking the action specified, and rewarding itself for so doing (Gaines, 1972b). This enabled me to replicate the positive effect of verbal instructions on my human subjects with identical phenomena in artificial adaptive controllers, demonstrating that the effects of coding, priming and training were all cybernetic phenomena in Wiener and Ashby's terms, a major thrust of my doctoral thesis which was very positivistic and behaviourist in keeping with the ethos of experimental psychology at that time.…”

From fuzzy logic to expert systems

“…Games and Andreae f9] had reported a similar problem with simulated control situations and introduced the notion of priming a learning machine with an initial suboptimal control strategy. Gaines [7] reported positive results with an adaptive threshold logic learning controller using a crude priming technique to simulate the effect of verbal instructions on a human trainee. Mamdani and Assilian decided to prime their system in a similar way, but using Zadeb's [36] suggestion of directly translating linguistic statements into decision rules using FST.…”

Training, stability and control

“…These definitions are by no rneans exhaustive and Gaines (1972a, b) gives an analysis in greater depth. However, the concepts of the adaption automaton, trajectories in its state-space, and those of potential and compatible adaption, suffice for the analysis of training in the remainder of this paper.…”

“…In Gaines (1972a) a strategy is derived for using performance feedback to generate a training sequence for a perceptual-motor skill, and experiments are described with both humans and simulated learning machines to illustrate the practical utility of the technique and demonstrate its independence of the nature of the trainee. It is argued in that paper that the training strategy utilised and the results obtained are of more general application and derive from fundamental characteristics of the nature of learning and training.…”

“…In particular the specific analysis of the tracking task system in Gaines (1972a) is related to a non-specific analysis of the class of such problems, and the abstract characteristics of this class which make feedback training possible are derived:…”