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Refining the Law of Practice
Citation
Evans, NJ and Brown, SD and Mewhort, DJK and Heathcote, A, Refining the Law of Practice, Psychological Review, 125, (4) pp. 592-605. ISSN 0033-295X (2018) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
Copyright 2018 American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors permission. The nal article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/rev0000105
Abstract
The "Law of Practice" - a simple nonlinear function describing the relation-
ship between mean response time (RT) and practice - has provided a practically
and theoretically useful way of quantifying the speed-up that characterizes skill ac-
quisition. Early work favored a power law, but this was shown to be an artifact of
biases caused by averaging over participants who are individually better described
by an exponential law. However, both power and exponential functions make the
strong assumption that the speedup always proceeds at a steadily decreasing rate,
even though there are sometimes clear exceptions. We propose a new law that can
both accommodate an initial delay resulting in a slower-faster-slower rate of learning,
with either power or exponential forms as limiting cases, and which can account for
not only mean RT but also the e ect of practice on the entire distribution of RT.
We evaluate this proposal with data from a broad array of tasks using hierarchical
Bayesian modeling, which pools data across participants while minimizing averaging
artifacts, and using inference procedures that take into account di erences in
exi-
bility among laws. In a clear majority of paradigms our results supported a delayed
exponential law.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Law of practice, learning, skill acquisition, bayesian hierarchical models |
| Research Division: | Psychology and Cognitive Sciences |
| Research Group: | Cognitive Sciences |
| Research Field: | Computer Perception, Memory and Attention |
| Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
| Objective Group: | Expanding Knowledge |
| Objective Field: | Expanding Knowledge in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences |
| Author: | Heathcote, A (Professor Andrew Heathcote) |
| ID Code: | 124354 |
| Year Published: | 2018 |
| Deposited By: | Psychology |
| Deposited On: | 2018-02-19 |
| Last Modified: | 2018-10-22 |
| Downloads: | 4 View Download Statistics |
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