Learning and Memory of Knowledge and Skills

Durability and Specificity

Alice F. Healy, Lyle E. Bourne, Alice F. Healy, Lyle E. Bourne

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780803957596, 9780803957589
• eBook ISBN: 9781452254999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

By analyzing the results of experiments that use a wide variety of training tasks including those that were predominantly perceptual, cognitive, or motoric, this volume answers such questions as: Why do some people forget certain skills faster than others? What kind of training helps people retain new skills longer? Inspired by the work of Harry Bahrick and the concept of "permastore," the contributors explore the Stroop effect, mental calculation, vocabulary retention, contextual interference effects, autobiographical memory, and target detection. They also summarize an investigation on specificity and transfer in choice reaction time tasks. In each chapter, the authors explore how the degree to which reinstatement of training procedures during retention and transfer tests accounts for both durability and specificity of training. Researchers and administrators in education and training will find important implications in this book for enhancing the retention of knowledge of skills. "You have to read this book. Anyone interested in training will want to read it. This book provides the theoretical bases of the acquisition of durable skills for the next decade. It advances and demonstrates a new principle of skill learning that will prove to be as important as the encoding specificity principle and its corollary, the principle of transfer appropriate processing. This new principle is that highly practiced skill learning will be durable when the retention test embodies the procedures employed during acquisition. This principle, and the other important findings reported in this text, will have a great impact on the evolution of memory theory and on the wide range of applications." --Douglas Hermann, University of Maryland

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: Durability and Specificity of Knowledge and Skills
• Chapter 1 - Optimizing the Long-Term Retention of Skills
• Chapter 2 - The Long-Term Retention of a Complex Skill
• Chapter 3 - The Contribution of Procedural Reinstatement to Implicit and Explicit Memory Effects in a Motor Task
• Chapter 4 - The Effects of Contextual Interference on the Acquisition and Retention of Logical Rules
• Chapter 5 - A Generation Advantage for Multiplication Skill Training and Nonword Vocabulary Acquisition
• Chapter 6 - A Long-Term Retention Advantage for Spatial Information Learned Naturally and in the Laboratory
• Chapter 7 - Long-Term Performance in Autobiographical Event Dating: Patterns of Accuracy and Error Across a Two-and-a-Half-Year Time Span
• Chapter 8 - Training and Retention of the Classic Stroop Task: Specificity of Practice Effects
• Chapter 9 - An Identical-Elements Model of Basic Arithmetic Skills
• Chapter 10 - Acquisition and Retention of Skilled Letter Detection
• Chapter 11 - Acquisition and Transfer of Response Selection Skill
• Chapter 12 - The Specificity and Durability of Rajan's Memory
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Authors and Editors