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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 relationship between mean response time (RT) and practice - has provided a practically and theoretically useful way of quantifying the speed-up that characterizes skill acquisition. 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 effect 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 differences in exibility 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 |
| UTAS Author: | Heathcote, A (Professor Andrew Heathcote) |
| ID Code: | 124354 |
| Year Published: | 2018 |
| Web of Science® Times Cited: | 13 |
| Deposited By: | Psychology |
| Deposited On: | 2018-02-19 |
| Last Modified: | 2018-12-12 |
| Downloads: | 20 View Download Statistics |
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