As a result of considerable potential scientific and societal implications, the possibility of enhancing cognitive ability by training has been one of the most influential topics of cognitive psychology in the last two decades. However, substantial research into the psychology of expertise and a recent series of meta-analytic reviews have suggested that various types of cognitive training (e.g....

This work describes a unified approach to two problems previously addressed separately in Intelligent Tutoring Systems: (i) Cognitive Modeling, which factorizes problem solving steps into the latent set of skills required to perform them [7]; and (ii) Student Modeling, which infers students’ learning by observing student performance [9]. The practical importance of improving understanding of ho...

Cognitive skills are concerned with analysis, interpretation and decision making required for performing the procedural tasks. Since much of its process runs inside a human mind, the development of cognitive skill may largely rely on self-explanation as a mechanism for forming better procedures by clustering elementary operations and pushing them in to subconscious level. It is important for a ...

We examined the controlling factors that allow a prompted skill to become autonomous in a discrete-trials implementation of Touchette's (1971) progressively delayed prompting procedure, but our subjects were rats rather than children with disabilities. Our prompted skill was a left-right lever-press sequence guided by two panel lights. We manipulated (a) the effectiveness of the guiding lights ...

Why are performance trade-offs so rarely detected in animals when their underlying physiological basis seems so intuitive? One possibility is that individual variation in health, fitness, nutrition, development or genetics, or 'individual quality', makes some individuals better or worse performers across all motor tasks. If this is the case, then correcting for individual quality should reveal ...

Transfer (i.e., the application of a learned skill in a novel context) is an important and desirable outcome of motor skill learning. While much research has been devoted to understanding transfer of explicit skills the mechanisms of skill transfer after incidental learning remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to (1) examine the effect of practice schedule on transfer and (2) inv...