Many new skills are acquired during early childhood. Typical laboratory skill learning tasks are not applicable for developmental studies that involve children younger than 8 years of age. It is not clear whether young children and adults share a basic underlying skill learning mechanism. In the present study, the learning and retention of a simple grapho-motor pattern were studied in three age...

INTRODUCTION The study of expertise tends to focus on humans who can perform extraordinary feats. Although the way in which expertise is acquired is often characterized as similar to everyday skill acquisition, the attainment of basic numeracy skills is rarely considered in the same context as the attainment of expertise. It is clear, though, that average numeracy skills possess all the hallmar...

Athletes devote their lives to practicing their chosen sport so as to attain the highest level of skilled performance. A perennial question is why are some athletes better than others? Most debates on this issue reduce to genetics (natural abilities) vs differences in accumulated deliberative practice. In contrast, the target article under discussion here reports on a study that identified psyc...

OBJECTIVE Box model trainers have been used for many years to facilitate the improvement of laparoscopic skills. However, there are limited data available on box trainers and their impact on skill acquisition, assessed by virtual reality systems. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty-two Postgraduate Year 1 gynecology residents with no laparoscopic experience were randomly divided into one group that r...

Amblyopia is the most common cause of monocular visual loss in children, affecting 1.3%-3.6% of children. Current treatments are effective in reducing the visual acuity deficit but many amblyopic individuals are left with residual visual acuity deficits, ocular motor abnormalities, deficient fine motor skills, and risk for recurrent amblyopia. Using a combination of psychophysical, electrophysi...

Analysis of visual search data suggests that the use of the microscope in the study of microanatomy is a high-level visuocognitive skill. Although the process of interpreting a microscope slide begins with perception and recognition, it quite often incorporates recall of anatomical knowledge and reasoning about the slide in the context of anatomy. Due to the system of cognitive processes in whi...

Histopathological tissue analysis by microscopy is a process that is subjective, prone to interand intra-observer variation. This, along with the problems associated with verbalising visual elements of the diagnostic process, make learning the skill quite difficult. Training is long and largely relies on an “apprentice” model, where trainees learn the skill by witnessing an expert at work. Here...

In contrast with visual perception, about which there is a larger body of knowledge, relatively little information exists concerning auditory perception and its relationship to reading. This fact is both surprising and troublesome as several researchers have found that auditory perceptual measures are better predictors of reading achievement than are visual perceptual measures (Blank, 1968; Lin...

We present a new method for analyzing a student’s learning over time, for a specific skill: analysis of the graph of the student’s moment-by-moment learning over time. Moment-bymoment learning is calculated using a data-mined model which assesses the probability that a student learned a skill or concept at a specific time during learning (Baker, Goldstein, & Heffernan, 2010, 2011). Two coders l...

Conventional neuropsychological norms developed for monolinguals likely overestimate normal performance in bilinguals on language but not visual-perceptual format tests. This was studied by comparing neuropsychological false-positive rates using the 50th percentile of conventional norms and individual comparison standards (Picture Vocabulary or Matrix Reasoning scores) as estimates of preexisti...