Lecture 15: Skill memory Flashcards
Skill memory
Skill/motor/procedural memory is a type of ____ memory
nondeclarative
____ is an ability that can improve over time through practice
skill
____ is a person who performs a skill better than most
Expert
____-____ ____ are learned movement patterns guided by sensory inputs
Perceptural-motor skill
____ ____ is a skill that requires problem solving or the application of strategies
Cognitive skill
Features of skill memories:
it is ____ to convey except by direct demonstration; it may be acquired (with/without) awareness; it also require several ____ to master.
difficult; without; repetitions
Features of memories for events and facts:
it (can/cannot) be communicated in different formats; it has content that is ____ accessible; it can be aquired through ____ exposure
can; consciously; single
____ ____ are commonly thought to depend more on intellectural prowess, but ____-____ ____ depend more on physical dexterity, speed, and strength
cognitive skills; perceptural-motor skills
____ ____ is a skill that involves performing predefined movements that, ideally, never vary; ____ ____ is a skill which movements are made on the basis of predictions about changing demands of the environment
closed skill; open skill
What is power law of practice?
“The degree to which each new practice session improves performance diminishes after a certain point, such that greater numbers of sessions are needed to further improve the skill”
= learning occurs quickly at first and then slows down
What are the independent and dependent variables of a learning curve?
- Independent variable: # of trials
- Dependent variable: probability of salivation (learning index)
What can be used to counteract the power law of practice, as in the example of kicking test?
Introducing new sources of feedback: After initial trial, rate of improvement in speed of kicking begun to slow. Then the participant was shown a film of optimum kicking, which helped him to improve his own kicking speed
____ ____ is concentrated, continuous practice of a skill, while ____ ____ is the practice of a skill that is spread out over several sessions
massed practice; spaced practice
____ practice improved performance more per hour of practice than ____ practice – However, although the group with ____ practice learned the task in fewer total hours, the training took longer.
spaced; massed; spaced
____ ____ is practice involving a constrained set of materials and skills (like practicing a certain skill), while ____ ____ is practice involving the performance of skills in a wide variety of contexts (gradually increasing the difficulty)
Constant practice; variable practice
____ ____ is learning that happens incidentally, without awareness of what has been learned.
Implicit learning
Why did individuals with anterograde amnesia provide early evidence of implicit skill learning?
Because they can’t form new explicit memories but still improve on tasks like mirror tracing, showing learning without conscious recall.
in the ____ ____ ____ task, participants learn to press one of four keys as soon as a visual cue (a light) indicates which key to press in either random or fixed sequence (not told to participants). This task tests the ____-____ skill.
serial reaction time; perceptual-motor skill
In the serial reaction time task, participants’ reaction times are slower when cues are presented in ____ order. Quicker reaction times for the ____ sequence indicates that participants ____ learned to anticipate which key they needed to press next, even though their verbal reports reveal no awareness that there was a fixed sequence.
random; fixed; implicitly
____ ____ are perceptual-motor skills that an organism can perform with minimal attention
motor programs (habits)
Paul Fitts proposed that skill learning usually progresses through 3 stages: What are they?
Cognitive stage, associative stage, autonomous stage
Paul Fitts skill learning model:
In ____ stage, an individual must actively think to encode and perform a skill. Next, in the ____ stage, learners begin to use stereotyped actions in performing a skill and rely less on actively recalled memories of rules. Finally, in the ____ stage, a skill or subcomponents of the skill become motor programs.
cognitive; associative; autonomous
People who seem to master a skill with little effort are often described as having a ____ of the skill.
Talent
Researchers frequently use the ____ ____ ____ in lab studies of perceptual-motor skill learning, in which a person gradually learns to keep a stylus above a particular point on a rotating disk
rotary pursuit task
In the ____ ____ ____, correlations between the performances of ____ twins increased with training, but the same correlation decreased in ____ twins after training. These findings suggest that practice ____ the effects of previous experience on motor performance and increases the effects of ____ influences
rotary pursuit task; identical; fraternal; decreases; genetic
Skill memories are often highly restricted and limited to that specific context. However, in the phenomenon of ____ __ ____, skills seem to transfer to novel situations – like writing with your non-dominant hand or even your mouth or foot
transfer of training
____ ____ is the restricted applicability of some learned skills to specific situations.
Transfer specificity
In the ____ ____ ____, Thorndike proposed that the transfer of learned abilities to novel situations depends on the number of ____ in the new situation that are ____ to those in when the skills were encoded
identical elements theory; elements; identical
____ ____ ____ is defined as acquiring the ability to learn novel tasks rapidly based on frequent experiences with similar tasks
learning set formation
The persistence of a skill depends on:
1. The ____ of the skill
2. How well the skill memory was ____ in the first place
3. How ____ the skill has subsequently been performed
4. The conditions in which ____ is attempted
- complexity
- encoded
- often
- recall
____ ____ is the loss of a skill through non-use (related to ____ forgetting)
skill decay; passive
Skill-memory systems in the brain include the ____ ____, ____ ____, and ____ – these three regions modulate the control of movements by circuits in the ____ and ____ ____
basal ganglia; cerebral cortex; cerebellum; brainstem; spinal cord
Where does L5 of primary sensory cortex give out its feedback?
striatum
Many of cortical inputs are initially processed by the ____ ____, a subregion of the ____ ____ that plays an important role in learning (__ –> __) association in operant conditioning, and it’s particularly important for controlling where the body moves and the preparation before moving.
dorsal striatum; basal ganglia; SD–>R
Control rats in a maze learn that there are food in each arm and avoids revisiting arms they have already visited.
Rats with ____ ____ damage can still perform this task, but damage to ____ (similar to patient H.M) drastically impairs the ability to learn this task.
basal ganglia; hippocampus
Control rats in a maze learn that there are food in each arm and avoids revisiting arms they have already visited.
When the maze added a perceptual-motor association component to the test (such as rats must enter only the arms illuminated with a light), rats with ____ damage also learn this association, but those with damaged ____ ____ have drastically impared ability to learn this association.
hippocampus; basal ganglia
3 steps of decision making in deliberation
1. determine potential ____ (requires a schema of how the world works – for Tolman this was the ____ ____)
2. evaluate the likely ____ of those actions
3. evaluate the ____ of imagined futures and make a choice
- possibilities; cognitive map
- outcomes
- value
In a multiple T-maze, rats can take several choices and self correct in the early ones, but will be ____ if they turned to the wrong side on the final turn.
punished
The multiple T-maze was changed everyday so rats learned new paths each day. Early trials require ____, whereas later trials become ____.
Deliberation; habitual
Deliberation…
- Occur more for ____ choices and ____ chocies, and occur less when actions become ____
difficult; important; habitual
The ____ ____ ____ ____ (VTE) primarily occurs at final choices point, but not at earlier ones. It ____ as the rat’s behavior becomes habitual.
Vicarious trial and error; decreases
____ ____ ____ is the process by which one imagines another time and space. This process is related to step __ of deliberation.
mental time travel; 2 (evaluate likely outcomes – require information/knowledge of past)
____ ____ ____ is when imagining possible future events activates similar representational systems to remembering past events, and how well one can do this is related to the condition of ____ memory of the individual. Damage to ____ impairs both of these processes.
episodic future thinking; episodic; hippocampus
When passing through sequence of place fields, rats experience high ACh level (), whereas when they are resting they have low ACh level ()
encoding; consolidation
____ is the replay of sequences from waking experience and have information repeatedly sent to cortex
consolidation
During ____ ____ ____ ____, rats at the turn may seem to be in ____, but their neural activity toggles between two different possible options and the respective ____ ____ of different routes light up back and forth. Once the behavior becomes ____, this neural look-ahead activity ceases.
vicarious trial and error (VTE); deliberation; place cells; habitual
single neuron recording in the ____ ____ during a perceptual-motor skill learning trial found that early in training, most neurons fired strongly when the rats ____ which direction to turn, but later in training neurons shifted to code the ____ and ____ of each trial. This demonstrates how the structure undergon changes as a function of ____ of a perceptual-motor skill
basal ganglia; chose/decided; beginning; end; learning
In the late stages of a perceptual-motor skill learning trial, ____ ____ activity at the begining of the trial initiates a ____ ____ that runs to completion potentially without any conscious control (=____ stage in Fitts’ learning model), and its activity at the end of the trial can serve as an ____ correction signal.
basal ganglia; motor plan; autonomous; error
Reorganization of ____ ____ areas responsible for executing the skills occurs following semantic skill learning – much like the reorganization of ____ cortex that resulted from discrimination training. This expansion also follows a ____ ____, where early trainings prompt rapid activation/improvement but more gradually in later sessions.
motor cortical; auditory; learning curve
____ ____ is an experimental task that requires individuals to trace drawings by watching a mirror image of their hand and tof the figure to be traced, with the actual hand and figure concealed. Learning of this task is disrupted by ____ lesions, but it doesn’t affect the ____ of learning.
mirror tracing; cerebellar; rate
