Page 193 - Deep Learning

176 Adaptation

training course for novice drivers to engender competent behavior on the street
and a flight simulator to engender competence in a real cockpit. A training
environment will differ in some respects from the real task environment, so
the skill will need to be adjusted during the transition, but the effort to adjust
should be small in proportion to the overall learning effort. The case of adapt-
ing an already mastered skill is similar. tracking changes in a task environment
would be prohibitively costly in terms of cognitive effort if every change trig-
gered the construction of a brand new skill. it is more plausible that we deal
with environmental change by re-using and modifying what we have already
learned. An experienced driver who visits a country where the inhabitants
drive on the opposite side of the road need not learn to drive from scratch but
adapts to the changed task environment in a few hours. in a vast knowledge
base containing skills for hundreds, possibly thousands, of tasks, how do our
brains know exactly which components of a skill can be re-used and how the
skill should be revised to fit an altered task environment? This is traditionally
known as the problem of transfer of training. 13
A coach, instructor or tutor can assist the skill acquisition process in
various ways: He typically ensures that the learner tackles problems of gradu-
ally increasing complexity, stretching his growing competence bit by bit,
but also provides helpful comments. Enormous sums of money are invested
in the belief that such assistance is effective. When a sports team performs
poorly, fans might call for the resignation, not of the players, but of the coach,
a rather flattering assessment of the latter’s importance for the team’s ability
to win. Ambitious parents of high school students sometimes pay as much as
$200 per hour for tutoring to ensure the academic success of their offspring.
Belief in the power of one-on-one instruction to abet skill acquisition is not
misplaced. Measures of learning show that one-on-one tutoring is indeed
more effective than other forms of instruction such as lectures and indepen-
dent practice. 14
our familiarity with instructional situations veils the underlying concep-
tual puzzle: How does instruction work? How can words spoken by another
person enter the learner’s mind and, once there, change his mental representa-
tion of the relevant skill so as to enable faster and more accurate execution?
How, by what cognitive processes, does the learner’s mind compute exactly
which revision in the skill is indicated by any one instruction? A theory of
skill acquisition should explain how and when, under which circumstances,
instruction helps, and enable us to improve the design of instruction in gen-
eral and computer-based instruction in particular.