Page 194 - Deep Learning

The Growth of Competence 177

in short, the familiar act of practicing a cognitive skill raises six funda-
mental questions:

1. Mechanism. How, by what cognitive processes, does practice exert its
effects? What is the internal structure of a single, local mutation in a cog-
nitive skill?
2. Sufficiency of practice. How can practice be sufficient to produce
improvement?
3. Necessity of practice. Why is practice necessary to acquire a skill?
4. Gradual improvement. Why is improvement gradual? Why does it exhibit
a negatively accelerated rate of change?
5. Transfer effects. How are acquired skills applied and re-used – transferred –
to novel or altered task environments?
6. Efficacy of instruction. Why is instruction possible? How does it work?
What are the factors that determine its effectiveness?
The approach to these questions developed in this and the two following
chapters is analogous to the approach to creativity employed in part ii of this
book: First, i develop a theory of stable, competent behavior. it specifies cogni-
tive processes for the execution of an already mastered skill. A theory of skill
acquisition extends the latter with specifications of the cognitive mechanisms
by which skills change and improve. due to a century of cumulative scientific
progress, we now possess a repertoire of hypotheses about those mechanisms.
The weakest component of that repertoire is the explanation of how people
learn from their errors. in Chapter 7, i propose a micro-theory of learning from
error, the second of the three technical contributions of this book. Chapter 8
develops the implications of the micro-theory for higher levels of scale.

RULES AND THE STRUCTURE OF ACTION

to describe change, we need a description of the system that is changing. A
theory of how skills change presupposes a theory of how skills are represented
and executed in the normal, routine case when no change is needed. How, by
which processes, are actions and cognitive operations selected and performed
when the relevant skill is already mastered and the environment is stable? one
of the great ironies of psychology is that the behaviorists, who for 50 years
aggressively argued that psychology is not the science of mind but the science
of behavior, never tried to describe human behavior as we see it all around us.
The broad strokes of the theory presented here are uncontroversial and shared
across the cognitive sciences; most of it is mere common sense. The purpose