Automatic Learning

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Automatic Learning

Postby NoCleverName » Fri Dec 06, 2013 5:37 am

Interesting how bits and pieces of knowledge inspire connections with skiing. This quote from an article today on Ars Tecnica about high-speed typists. It seems they no longer have any idea where a lot of the keys are. I know it has something to do with skiing, in particular how HH has discovered how to teach skiing ... but I'm not sure what!

The basic theory of “automatic learning,” according to Vanderbilt University, asserts that people learn actions for skill-based work consciously and store the details of why and how in their short-term memory. Eventually the why and how of a certain action fades, but the performative action remains.

However, in the case of typing, it appears that we don’t even store the action—that is, we have little to no “explicit knowledge” of the keyboard. In the first experiment conducted, the typists averaging 72 wpm and 94 percent accuracy were given 80 seconds to write letters in the correct places on a QWERTY keyboard. On average, they got 57 percent right and 22.3 percent wrong, and they forgot the rest.


I suppose it implies that a WC skier may not actually be able to teach you how they ski ... because they really don't know themselves.
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Re: Automatic Learning

Postby HighAngles » Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:27 pm

That sounds about right to me. And that's the beauty of PMTS - here we have a system where HH has reverse engineered what's happening in skiing at the highest levels and brought those movements "down to earth" for the rest of us.

I'm not surprised to see that stat on typists' knowledge of key placement. I'm a fairly fast typist and I probably wouldn't score much higher than 60-70% myself. I should try that test and see how I do. :wink:
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Re: Automatic Learning

Postby cheesehead » Sat Dec 07, 2013 10:27 am

Their conclusions don't make any sense to me. Typing is the same as any other learned activity and of course involves learning physical skills, but it involves teaching your fingers what to do, not by referencing a visual memory of a whole keyboard.

Good typists can type by the word, in other words they put a sequence of finger strokes together to type a word, they don't have a picture of the letters of the keyboard in their head and go and hunt down the letter they want from that picture. A word, in other words is like a turn. PMTS teaches you how to do a turn, and while the turn may vary in its conditions, a word may vary in the keystrokes needed, but a turn is a turn and a word is a word.

To continue the rough analogy, PSIA has the "toolbox" method, where you are frozen in time with no context before or after, responding with an isolated response, "a tool in a toolbox," analogous to hunting down that letter P on a whole keyboard rather than knowing the P is reached by using your right little finger reaching up and over.

So PMTS uses the process of a skiing turn and PSIA uses an isolated reaction. It is a question of chicken vs. the egg how PSIA made wrong choices of promoting wide stances, equal weighting, leaning and hip dumping, but it is conceivable that they made those choices without thinking about the process of a ski turn just what in the moment seems right -- "if you feel out of balance just widen your stance, that will fix that snapshot!" for example.
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Re: Automatic Learning

Postby NoCleverName » Mon Dec 09, 2013 10:07 am

It seems to me the paper (which I have not read) is saying something a bit more subtle. And perhaps applicable to skiing.

To use a simpler "car" example (favored by Slashdot) we all learn to use a standard's foot pedals a with conscious action at first and then seemingly "automatically"... (it gets so ingrained that I sometimes head for the clutch even though I've had an automatic for 10 years). But no matter how ingrained it gets, we can still point to each pedal and tell someone what it does.

In the case of the highspeed typists, it's gone beyond that in that if you ask "what do you press to get an 'e' ", they can't tell you!

In the same way sentences comprise words constructed from characters, HH has tried to identify the atomic components of movement that you put together to ski effectively and efficiently. By isolating proper movements ... almost like practicing the finger movement that selects the right key on the keyboard... you are supposed to build up a vocabulary of movements. You put these together to form larger parts of the turn. You string these "words" together to form the final "sentence" which hopefully isn't gibberish. Then, too, he's got the "external cues" (e.g., you see the correct character displayed) so that you can tell if you are getting it right.

At least that's the plan ...

And when you're done, you might not know exactly how you've done it, but this really great turn is supposed to come out of you!
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Re: Automatic Learning

Postby cheesehead » Mon Dec 09, 2013 3:11 pm

And there's nothing like the subject of typing to fire up a skier!


It is interesting though
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Re: Automatic Learning

Postby milesb » Sun Dec 15, 2013 11:15 am

lol, a realtime strategy gamer could tell you exactly where the keys are!
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