Hot answers tagged learning
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Negative Transfer
A common scientific term to describe what you are talking about is called negative transfer. I.e., where learning one skill actually results in lower performance on another skill. This is contrasted with positive transfer, when learning one skill facilitates performance on another skill. In general (although I don't have refs on hands) ...
13
The answer to this question will depend on how you construe 'cognitive abilities.' For instance, for certain formulations the answer is trivially yes: an economist who learns psychology may come away with psychological knowledge that could help his economics, like how to space out his studying to maximally improve retention; or how to deal with the ...
10
SVM training is typically done in a batch processing, and thus the order of data presentation doesn't matter. You should consider online learning algorithms, for example, the perceptron learning rule. These algorithms are in general stochastic gradient descent optimization procedures, and easy examples early on with larger learning step would be much more ...
9
A few quick points:
There is a massive empirical literature that shows that fairly strong correlations are obtained between IQ and important real world outcomes, perhaps most notably educational and job performance, often in the r = .5 range (see here for a summary).
Correlations with learning are complicated by what we mean by learning. In particular, if ...
9
Although I don't know any publications exactly on that matter it is possible to be true.
So please treat this as a speculation.
People with Asperger Syndrome (or High-Functioning Autism) have higher attention to detail and tend to build more rigid structures in their minds (while neurotypicals may have more error-tolerant but less efficient structures). So ...
9
It's a local rule. All that it means is that the connection between two neurons gets stronger if you use that specific connection more. The specific connection (the synapse) must be used though; it doesn't apply to two random neurons that aren't connected that happen to fire at the same time.
Hebbian learning is generic term for outcome; there are ...
9
I wouldn't worry about "running out" of room in our brain. We often forget things just because we don't need to know them, similar to . There are plenty of human savants that display apparently "unlimited" capacities of certain forms of memory, such as Hyperthymesia where one has a seemingly perfect amount of recall of autobiographical details (not to be ...
7
One thing that comes to mind is the discussion over why English-speaking people think submarines cannot swim, while they think airplanes can fly. Supposedly in Russian, though, they do refer to submarines as "swimming."
Meanwhile, we ask whether computers can think, without really realizing that this question turns out to be simply a question about ...
7
An excellent question! A 2011 paper in Science by Karpicke and Blunt in the Cognition and Learning Lab at Purdue University gets at this issue. They offer that:
"Concept mapping is considered an active learning task, and it serves
as an elaborative study activity when students construct concept maps
in the presence of the materials they are learning. ...
7
To take your concrete examples, there are several broad distinctions relevant to comparing a task like chess and a task like playing Pac Man.
Cognitive versus psychomotor skill
Research on learning and task performance is divided into various domains of tasks. Two such domains are cognitive, of which chess would be an example, and psychomotor, of which ...
7
What you're thinking of is called an Intermittent Reinforcement Schedule. Different Reinforcement schedules have different effects, variable ratio in particular seems to be what you're getting at:
a reinforcement schedule in which the number of responses necessary to produce reinforcement varies from trial to trial
What's important is the behavior is ...
7
According to current models of human concept learning, the answer to your question is both.
Think of a simplified domain in which every object consists of only several features, and therefore can be visualized as a point in some multidimensional feature space. For example, the features that define objects might be its size, shape, color, and weight. ...
7
A recent senior thesis by Schoen (2012) addressed this exact question. Students watched a filmed lecture and were randomly assigned to take notes with either by typing or handwriting. After the lecture, students were given a few distractor tasks, and then given a retention test. Other students were assigned to take notes from a textbook, instead of a ...
6
There are two types of learning - knowledge and skills. Knowledge can be used in many different contexts, but skills are extremely narrow and precise. For example, subjects trained in memorizing numbers do not have any better ability at memorizing lists of words than untrained individuals.
We tend to think that practicing mental tasks must also have some ...
6
Another way of thinking about this is that by progressing easy-to-hard, different intermediate knowledge structures are called into existence in the course of processing. These knowledge structures, built from an agent's encounter with easy problems, can prove useful in its encounter with subsequent and more difficult problems.
This idea has been around ...
6
I think it would be unfair to reduce this effect to a single number-- most certainly, it depends on the task at hand, as well as a number of other factors.
To give a rough idea, though, you may want to look at Richland et al. (2005) who found roughly a 25% increase in retention on a knowledge test when using interleaving. Also noted in this article,
...
6
Concept mapping is a way of reviewing the material, depending on the study it may be significantly better than other forms of review, though not all studies I read found that superiority. The most popular theory for its claimed superiority is that it also organizes the information better for recall; most of the papers that found concept mapping better than ...
6
Fernando et al. (2008) proposed a neuronal mechanism to copy network topologies from one region of the brain to another which is based on Spike Timing Dependent Placticity (STDP) and argue that the mechanism of neuronal copying is a neuronal implementation of causal inference.
Fernando C, Karishma KK, Szathmáry E. (2008) Copying and evolution of neuronal ...
6
First, the concept of optimality of a learning curve is not well defined. You can measure at least 3 different aspects of learning:
Speed of learning
Time before extinction
Performance at peak
Of course, there may be other measures as well, and any combination of such measure may also be a legitimate measure for certain uses.
Conditioned Taste Aversion ...
6
The research literature on stress in general and burnout in particular would be relevant. The stress literature is massive and there are studies that have a particular focus on students.
For example Jacobs and Dodd did a study on college student burnout:
Measures of social support (Multidimen- sional Scale of Perceived
Social Support), personality ...
6
There is a functional dissociation between short and long-term memory.
It was observed by Milner (1966) that a patient (case H.M) can have a normally working short-term memory with an impaired long term one; and by Shallice & Warrington (1970) that a patient (K.F.) can have correct long-term memory performance while a severe impairment in short-term ...
6
Learning Styles
There is a large literature on learning styles particularly in educational psychology. See for example, the wikipedia page on learning styles.
You will soon discover that there are many different taxonomies of learning styles. Thus, there are certainly more than three "theorised" learning styles.
However, more importantly, there have been ...
6
Theoretical perspective:
No. I don't think so. From a cognitive information processing perspective, I would hypothesise that declarative learning of new facts would not occur while sleeping. Of course, learning declarative facts while awake, but in bed (e.g., when going to sleep or when waking up in the morning) is possible, and sleep is important in ...
6
Humans actually exhibit both slow and fast learning and they have somewhat different properties. One distinction is between "declarative" memory (for example, facts like "tigers have stripes" or "Paris is the capital of France") and "procedural" learning (such as perceptuo-motor skills like riding a bike or playing a musical instrument). Declarative memory ...
5
Principles of optimal practice duration from the expertise literature
The expertise literature and its discussion of deliberate practice provides substantial guidance on the question of optimal practice duration.
As Ericsson et al (2006) summarised:
elite performers search continuously for optimal training
activities, with the most effective duration ...
5
Here's something I dug up for language: a Computer Science Thesis from Boulder:
The Sensorimotor Foundations of Phonology: A Computational Model of Early Childhood Articulatory and Phonetic Development (1994)
it discusses what it calls HABLAR (Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language
Acquisition by Reinforcement learning).
From the reductionist/biology ...
5
Interesting question. I've written up a discussion of the model-based training literature and how it relates structuring task difficulty with practice. That said, I feel it's only a start and my apologies that it is more pitched at cognitive tasks than perceptual tasks.
A summary of model-based training systems
Fu et al (2006) have a paper on real-time ...
5
It sounds like you are interested in the Spacing Effect.
A search on Google Scholar for "spacing effect" for articles published since the year 2000 yields over 2500 articles some of which might be worth pursuing.
Perhaps you might want to start by having a read through the meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Cepeda et al (2006). To quote the ...
5
In general, parental involvement/engagement has lots of positive social, emotional, cognitive, and academic effects for a child's development. Some evidence suggests that the positive effects of relatively general factors like improved parent-child relationship, increasing motivation and (positive) expectations, etc., are stronger than the specific benefits ...
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