Skill Acquisition 1 Production Composition: A Simple Theory of Complex Skill Acquisition

In psychology many of theories of skill acquisition have had great success in addressing the fine details of learning relatively simple tasks, but can they scale up to complex tasks that are more typical of human learning in the real world? In this paper we describe production composition, a theory of skill acquisition that combines aspects of the theories forwarded by Anderson (1982) and Newell and Rosenbloom (1981), that we believe can model the fine details of learning in complex and dynamic tasks. We use production composition to model in detail learning in a simulated air-traffic controller task.