Publication Date:
1988-10-21
Description:
Numerous human learning phenomena have been observed and captured by individual laws, but no unified theory of learning has succeeded in accounting for these observations. A theory and model are proposed that account for two of these phenomena: the power law of practice and the problem-solving fan-effect. The power law of practice states that the speed of performance of a task will improve as a power of the number of times that the task is performed. The power law resulting from two sorts of problem-solving changes, addition of operators to the problem-space graph and alterations in the decision procedure used to decide which operator to apply at a particular state, is empirically demonstrated. The model provides an analytic account for both of these sources of the power law. The model also predicts a problem-solving fan-effect, slowdown during practice caused by an increase in the difficulty of making useful decisions between possible paths, which is also found empirically.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Shrager, J -- Hogg, T -- Huberman, B A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1988 Oct 21;242(4877):414-6.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA 94304.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3175664" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Decision Making
;
Humans
;
Learning
;
Mathematics
;
*Models, Psychological
;
*Problem Solving
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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