[Avery Andrews 920104.1339[
Dennis Delprato (930114)
Cool. Smith & Smith have a useful bad guy list, tho with nothing after
1981, so it would still be good to know what Schmidt 1982 has to say.Does this mean you don't have access to R. A. Schmidt's Motor
Control and Learning, referred to by Jordan & Rosenbaum (in
Posner, Ed., Foundations of Cog. Sci.? I can probably find a
Yes. This would be very helpful. I can't promise a good product
real soon, since I'm feeling overextended & have to do some linguistics
soon, but I do promise to try to try, as it were.
I agree entirely that levels is the key here. Presumably what there is
in piano playing is systems that set a series of reference levels in
sequence, without waiting for evidence that one has been achieved in
order to set the next, with the details in charge of lower-level systems
(are the spinal reflex loops fast enough to be useful in controlling
piano playing, or are their effects actually disturbances that have to
be pre-compensated for?). But many higher-level aspects of the performance
then require perception of what has happened already (I'm a firm
believer in the existence and importance of response-chaining in
everyday life).
In K. VanLehn's `Problem Solving and Cognitive Skill Acquisition' in
the Posner volume, p. 555, there's an interesting statement about
automization of skills:
If exactly the same task is practiced for hundreds of trials, it
can be automatized, that is, it will be very rapid, cease to
interfere with concurrent tasks, and run to completion once
started even if the subject tries to stop it. If the task varies
beyond certain limits during training, however, even hundreds of
practice trials to not suffice for automatization (Schneider and
Shiffrin 1977, Schiffrin and Sneider (1977).
the citations are:
1) Controlled and automatic human information processing:I.
Detection, search and attention. Psychological Review 84:1-66.
2) Controlled and automatic human information processing:II.
Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory.
Psych. Rev. 84:127-190
(Lest people get false ideas about my ability to cover literature, the
book literally just fell open at that page, so I read the paragraph at
the top. Pennies from Heaven.)
So my story would be that there are automatic routines, which are
presumably normally very short, but with extensive practice can be
made larger. And may be the skill acquisition literature can provide
some actual evidence about what kinds of disturbances these lower level
units can handle (assuming that that's what `varying the task' involves).
Bill Powers (930113), psychologists & cyberneticians
I found some likely-looking references to feedback bungles in
Quantitative Analysis of Purposive Behavior, but who actually commits
the Input Error?
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au