Skill Acquisition 1 Production Composition : A Simple Theory of Complex Skill Acquisition NIELS

In psychology, many of theories of skill acquisition have had great success in addressing the fine details of learning relatively simple tasks, but can they scale up to complex tasks that are more typical of human learning in the real world? In this paper we describe production composition, a theory of skill acquisition that combines aspects of the theories forwarded by Anderson (1982) and Newell and Rosenbloom (1981), that we believe can model the fine details of learning in complex and dynamic tasks. We use production composition to model in detail learning in a simulated air-traffic controller task. 2 INTRODUCTION From controlling air-traffic to operating nuclear power plants, researchers in human factors have accumulated extensive empirical knowledge on human performance in complex and dynamic tasks. However development of detailed computational models that can explain how people are able to problem solve and learn such tasks has lagged behind. One reason is that most researchers have focused on developing computational models of learning simple tasks, while very few researchers have attempted to develop models of skill development in complex and dynamic tasks. Although we have gained deep insights from studying simple tasks, in order to move toward a complete theory of skill acquisition we need to develop and test our model against complex and dynamic tasks that are more typical of human learning in the real world. Toward this goal, we describe production composition, a theory of skill acquisition that combines aspects of theories proposed by Anderson's (1982) and Newell and Rosenbloom's (1981). We use production composition to develop a detailed model of learning in a simulated air-traffic control task. Production composition Skill acquisition is usually characterized as going through three stages: the cognitive stage, the associative stage, and the autonomous stage (Fitts, 1964). The three stages can be characterized as moving from conscious processing, slow and error-prone to unconscious processing, fast and error-free. Anderson (1982) explained these three stages in terms of a transition from declarative knowledge to procedural knowledge. In the cognitive stage knowledge is declarative and needs to be interpreted. Interpreting knowledge is slow and may lead to errors if the relevant knowledge cannot be retrieved at the right time. Procedural knowledge on the other hand is compiled and therefore fast and free of errors and is associated Skill Acquisition 3 with the autonomous stage. The associative stage is a transitional stage during which knowledge is partly declarative …