Individual differences in skill acquisition are influenced by several architectural factors. According to Ackerman’s theory, general intelligence, speed of proceduralization and psychomotor speed influence different stages of skill acquisition. The ACT-R cognitive architecture allows for direct testing of this theory by manipulating parameters that correspond to these factors. The present study...

If motor or action programs become modules with practice their defining features (e.g. relative timing) should remain relatively invariant in new tasks. To test this hypothesis 24 adults practiced a graphic skill over 100 trials and were transferred to a more complex task enclosing the practiced figure. The data acquired by a digital tablet resulted in total movement and total pause times to dr...

The studies presented in this dissertation were funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, The Hague, project no. 575-22-006). They were conducted at Maastricht University and at the Open University of The Netherlands in Heerlen. The conference presentations emerging from this project were financed by grants provided by NWO and the Limburg University Fund (SWOL). ecaus...

One of the fundamental goals of artificial intelligence is to understand and develop intelligent agents that simulate human-level intelligence. A lot of effort has been made to develop intelligent agents that simulate human learning of math and science, e.g., for use in cognitive tutors. However, constructing such a learning agent currently requires manual encoding of prior domain knowledge for...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for reinforcement learning agents in continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to an end-of-task reward. We demonstrate experimentally that skill chaining is able to create appropriate skills in a challenging continuous domain and that doing so results in performance gains.

Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an emerging theory of thinking and learning built on results in the neural, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. We outline this framework and consider some of i...

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...