The benefits from practice follow a nonlinear function: Improvement is rapid at first but decreases as the practitioner becomes more skilled (see, e.g., Thorndike, 1913). The idea that a simple nonlinear function might describe practice effects in a broad range of tasks was championed by Newell and Rosenbloom’s (1981) influential chapter entitled “Mechanisms of Skill Acquisition and the Law of ...

In recent years, the study of memory has been the subject of discussions among those researchers who try to identify the mechanisms and contents of memory and those who concentrate in discovering their functions. These two approaches differ not only in the theoretical explanations that they offer to some phenomena, but also in which phenomena they consider worth pursuing and how and where these...