Automaticity
Some procedures/ skills may require theoretical knowledge and its conscious, planned implementation - this uses both long term and working factual memory.
Features of an automatic behavior are all or some of: efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionality, uncontrollability. Such behavior may possibly be in response to stimulii. They are aka habits. When their optimality in accomplishing a certain task is measurable, they are called skills.
Examples
Piloting: not a conscious skill - so need to make mistakes on simulator, besides conscious understanding of mistakes. Math: a conscious skill - so, can learn to deliberately avoid mistakes.
Independence from working memory
Procedural memory is outside working memory: so some pianists can play a complex piece while holding a conversation.
Even highly skilled performers falter under stress - aka choking. Attention to step-by-step procedure, which bypasses prcedural memory and uses working + long term factual memory, disrupts automatic performance.
Automation of conscious skills
This is when a skill becomes automatic. Eg: trained morse code operators can copy a message while holding a conversation; a martial artist automatically kicks and punches optimally.
Practice
Repetition is fundamental to the development of skills and habits (habituation). Just as skills can be improved, habits can be removed or replaced by learning an an alternate response procedure.
Feedback and its attribution are considered elsewhere.
Deliberate practice
When combined with good feedback and done over a long term, we get deliberate practice. A certain study observed that in many varied fields, expert performance is attained after 10000 hours or roughly 10 years of practice.
Effect of sleep
REM Sleep is shown to be beneficial to procedural learning.
Feedback in skill development
Feedback - whether endogenous or exogenous, whether detailed or gross is necessary for learning skills.
Attribution of feedback
Attribution of some occurrence or affect (+ve or -ve) to prior occurrence (especially action) is an important part of the sequence prediction mechanism.
Role of reasoning
Attribution is often instinctive, but is sometimes mediated and modulated by reasoning.
Power of automatic attribution
Grokking complex patterns
The dopamine system recognizes complex temporal patterns in regular environment, even when the pattern does not have a verbal representation. Eg: Recognizing faces, balancing a cycle, The gulf war incident where a anti-missile commander, having stared at the radar for days, distinguished incoming missiles from returning friendly jets; but could not explain how.
Limitations
Trusting intuition good only in regular environments with good feedback (even if they are complex). In highly irregular environments, better not trust intuition.
Arousal attribution bias
A person is predisposed towards attributing arousal to another person/ agency. For example, a person aroused by his presence on a tall bridge is likely to attribute it to a female he talks to on a bridge; romantic dates involving roller-coaster rides are often successful.
Reasoning based attribution
Superstition
Behaviorists called this tendency to learn to associate an action with a result by the name ``law of effect’’, which in many cases would be a ‘post hoc ergo poster hoc’ fallacy. In controversial experiments by Skinner, what could be superstition-motivated rituals such as bobbing head, rotating were developed by pigeons expecting food - even though food was mechanically provided at regular intervals. Compulsive gamblers - who often have an overactive dopamine system - develop superstitions and believe in omens.
Connection to age
Early development skills
Some skills can be learned only by young animals. For example:
- Children not exposed to language in their early childhood never learn it.
- Perfect pitch recognition is only possible with musical education before the age of 7.
- Perfect accent is possible only if the child is exposed to a language’s phonemes in early childhood. Babies’ movement rhythms vary with the language spoken around them.