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How Do We Learn Complex Skills? Understanding ACT-R Theory - Scott H Young

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How do we learn to perform complex skills like programming, physics, or piloting a plane? What changes in our brain allow us to perform these skills? How much does learning one thing help us learn something else? These are hard questions. Most experiments only attempt to address narrow slices of the problem. How does the schedule of studying impact memory? Is it better to re-read or retrieve? Should you practice a whole skill, or build up to it from its parts? These don’t directly address the big questions. This is what makes John Anderson’s ACT-R theory so ambitious.1 It’s an attempt to synthesize a huge amount of work in psychology to form a broad picture of how we learn complicated skills. Even if the theory turns out not to be the whole story, it helps illuminate our understanding of the problem. Before I get to explaining ACT-R, I need to step back and talk about how to think about scientific theories, in general. All scientific theories are built on paradigms. A paradigm is an ex

How do we learn to perform complex skills like programming, physics, or piloting a plane? What changes in our brain allow us to perform these skills? How much does learning one thing help us learn something else? These are hard questions. Most experiments only attempt to address narrow slices of the problem. How does the schedule of studying impact memory ? Is it better to re-read or retrieve ? Should you practice a whole skill, or build up to it from its parts ? These don’t directly address the big questions. This is what makes John Anderson’s ACT-R theory so ambitious. 1 It’s an attempt to s

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