Skill in expert dogs

The motor control of novice participants is often cognitively demanding and susceptible to interference by other tasks. As people develop expertise, their motor control becomes less susceptible to interference from other tasks. Researchers propose a transition in human motor skill from active control to automaticity. This progression may also be the case with nonhuman animals. Differences in performance characteristics between expert, advanced, intermediate, and novice dogs competing in the sport of agility were investigated. There were statistically significant differences between dogs of varying competitive levels in speed, motor control, and signal detections suggestive of increasing motor control automaticity in highly skilled, or expert, dogs. The largest sequential motor control difference was between novice and intermediate dogs, d = .96, whereas the largest sequential signal detection difference was between advanced and expert dogs, d = .90. These findings have two significant implications for expertise researchers: first, the observed similarities between dogs and humans may enable dogs to be used as expert models; and second, expertise science and methods may be profitably employed in the future to create more proficient canine workers.     

Wisdom as an Expert Skill

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities.     

Mechanism Involvement During Skill Imagery

Explanations of the effects of initial mental imagery practice on the subsequent performance of a motor task may be divided into two categories. Inflow explanations propose that proprioceptive feedback generated during imagery practice serves as the underlying mechanism while outflow explanations claim that cognitive operations (e.g., motor programs) generated during skill imagery serve as the basis for physical performance. A test of these two models was conducted by comparing unilateral and bilateral transfer in a rotary pursuit task following either imagery or physical practice (cf. Wallace, 1977). The results showed that all transfer groups produced positive transfer relative to a no-practice control group. Further, unilateral transfer was greater than bilateral transfer for physical practice. There was no difference between unilateral and bilateral transfer for imagery practice. These data were interpreted as evidence for an outflow explanation of skill imagery.     

Improvisation as a Meta-Counseling Skill

Counselor education tends to see the development of basic counseling and communication skills as the foundation of clinical training. Improvisation has historically and primarily been connected to theater training and as a performance mechanism. By developing skills in spontaneity and the nature of narrative (or story) one becomes more able to be in-the-moment with a client or clients and thus less anxious and more able to meet the client where they are. As such, improvisation can really be seen as a meta-counseling skill—a skill that can form a firmer foundation for the learning of the basic counseling and communication micro-skills. This article outlines the core concepts of improvisational training for counselors and includes examples of improvisational games that can specifically help in preparing counselor trainees for their future clinical work.     

Lassoing Skill Through Learner Choice

The authors examined several issues related to the motor learning benefits resulting from giving learners choices. In 2 experiments, participants practiced a novel task, throwing a lasso. In Experiment 1, giving learners a choice ostensibly irrelevant to performance (color of mat under target) resulted in enhanced learning relative to a control group. The choice group also reported more positive affect. Experiment 2 compared the effectiveness of task-irrelevant (mat color) versus task-relevant (video demonstrations of the skill) choices. In both choice groups, each participant was yoked to a participant in the other group, and each received the same mat color or saw the video demonstration, respectively, as chosen by their counterpart in the other group. In the control group, participants were yoked to their respective counterparts in each of the choice groups. On a retention test, the 2 choice groups did not differ from each other, but both outperformed the control group. The affective and learning effects seen when learners are given choices, and the fact that task-relevant and task-irrelevant choices resulted in similar learning benefits, are consistent with a content-neutral mechanism for the effects of choice on learning, as described in the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning (Wulf &; Lewthwaite, 2016 Wulf, G., &; Lewthwaite, R. (2016). Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning. Psychonomic Bulletin &; Review, 23, 1382–1414. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0999-9.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).     

Skill in Work and Play

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Perceptual Skill And Social Structure

Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill.     

Speech Motor Skill and Stuttering

The authors review converging lines of evidence from behavioral, kinematic, and neuroimaging data that point to limitations in speech motor skills in people who stutter (PWS). From their review, they conclude that PWS differ from those who do not in terms of their ability to improve with practice and retain practiced changes in the long term, and that they are less efficient and less flexible in their adaptation to lower (motor) and higher (cognitive–linguistic) order requirements that impact on speech motor functions. These findings in general provide empirical support for the position that PWS may occupy the low end of the speech motor skill continuum as argued in the Speech Motor Skills approach (Van Lieshout, Hulstijn, & Peters, 2004).     

汉字输入中认知技能与动作技能的分离

通过20名大学生在采用目光注视屏幕上的键盘完成汉字输入任务的眼动研究,将汉字输入中的认知技能与动作技能实现分离,从而探究关于键盘布局图式的认知技能的发展.结果发现:(1)在标准键盘显示下,汉字输入技能水平高分组与低分组在完成时间上没有显著差异,而空白键盘显示下高分组的完成时间显著快于低分组;(2)两种键盘显示方式下,低分组的眼动指标都没有显著差异,而高分组在空白键盘显示下的平均注视时间要显著多于标准键盘显示下的.     

Evidence of validity for the Skill Scale scores of the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the evidence of validity of the Skill Scale scores on the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (CISS). In a sample of 221 college students, analyses between the CISS Skill Scale scores and the CISS Interest Scale, the Strong Interest Inventory, and selfreported MAEQ abilities scores were conducted. Results provided evidence of convergent and discriminate validity of the Skill Scale scores. Furthermore, Skill Scale scores were found to be predictive of declared college major above chance levels. Conclusions from the results support the use of the CISS Skill Scales in counseling settings. Further investigation of the content being measured by the Skill Scales and their use in career interventions is recommended.     

Geopolitical Forecasting Skill in Strategic Intelligence

Extending research by the authors on intelligence forecasting, the forecasting skill of 3622 geopolitical forecasts extracted from strategic intelligence reports was examined. The codable subset of forecasts (N = 2013) was expressed with verbal probabilities (e.g., likely) and translated to numeric probability equivalents. This subset showed very good calibration and discrimination, but also underconfidence. There was no support for the hypothesis that forecasting skill was good mainly because of the general ease of forecasting topics. First, forecasting skill was as good among authoritative key judgments as in the general set. Second, forecasts that were assigned high degrees of certainty, indicative of ease, (p ≤ 0.05 or p ≥ 0.95) did not discriminate as well as less certain forecasts (0.05 < p < 0.95), and these subsets did not differ in calibration. Sensitivity and benchmarking tests further revealed that if the 1609 uncodable forecasts were all assigned forecast probabilities of .5 (i.e., if all followed a “cautious ignorance” rule), skill characteristics would still show a large effect size improvement over a variety of guesswork strategies. The findings support a cautiously optimistic assessment of forecasting skill in strategic intelligence and indicate that such skill is not primarily attributable to the selection of easy forecasting topics. However, the large proportion of uncodable cases suggests that intelligence forecasts could be improved by avoiding imprecise language that affects not only the codability but also, in all likelihood, the interpretability and indicative value of forecasts for intelligence consumers. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Skill Acquisition and the LISP Tutor

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power-law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work.     

Comprehension‐Based Skill Acquisition

We present a comprehension‐based computational model of UNIX user skill acquisition and performance in a training context (UNICOM). The work extends a comprehension‐based theory of planning to account for skill acquisition and learning. Individual models of 22 UNIX users were constructed and used to simulate user performance on successive command production problems in a training context. Comparisons of model and the human empirical data result in a high degree of agreement, validating the ability of UNICOM to predict user response to training.     

Skill transfer through goal-driven representation mapping

In this paper, we present an approach to transfer that involves analogical mapping of symbols across different domains. We relate this mechanism to Icarus, a theory of the human cognitive architecture. Our system can transfer skills across domains hypothesizing maps between representations, improving performance in novel domains. Unlike previous approaches to analogical transfer, our method uses an explanatory analysis that compares how well a new domain theory explains previous solutions under different mapping hypotheses. We present experimental evidence that the new mechanism improves transfer over Icarus’ basic learning processes. Moreover, we argue that the same features which distinguish Icarus from other architectures support representation mapping in a natural way and operate synergistically with it. These features enable our analogy system to translate a map among concepts into a map between skills, and to support transfer even if two domains are only partially analogous. We also discuss our system’s relation to other work on analogy and outline directions for future research.     

Skill in Interviewing Reduces Confirmation Bias

Interviewers given prior information are biassed to seek it from interviewees. We examined whether the detrimental impact of this confirmation bias in terms of leading question use was moderated by interviewers' demonstrated ability to adhere to open questions. We classified interviewers' adherence as ‘good’ or ‘poor’ in an independent interview before they interviewed children about a staged event. Half the interviewers were given biassing true and false information about the event; half were given no information. As predicted, only poor interviewers showed the effect of bias. Poor interviewers asked fewer open questions in the biassed condition than the non‐biassed condition; good interviewers asked the same (high) proportion of open questions in both conditions. Poor interviewers asked more leading questions in the biassed condition than the non‐biassed condition; good interviewers asked the same (low) proportion of leading questions in both conditions. These results demonstrate that interviewers' skill in adhering to open questions reduces the detrimental impact of confirmation bias on question type. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Music Sight-Reading Skill in Flute Players

This article reports an investigation of factors related to music sight-reading skill. Flute players (N = 30) performed six tasks: (a) sight-reading standard music, (b) sight-reading random music, (c) recall of music notation, (d) recall of letters, (e) eye-performance span, and (f) choice reaction time for playing individual notes. Sight-reading ability was significantly correlated with eye-performance span (.85), and music recall (.80), but not with letter recall (-.39), thus replicating results of previous work with pianists. Sight-reading skill was correlated with choice reaction time to notes (- .54), and there was a significant partial correlation between sight-reading skill and eye-performance span, with music-reading ability controlled. These results are consistent with the idea that increased skill involves both the speed-up of individual processing stages, and an increase in the degree to which these stages operate in parallel.