What is it about?
The paths individuals take to skilled performance is NOT characterized by steady log-log (i.e., Power Law) increments. Individual performance often plateaus with many of us being content with less than optimal performance. Some of us, some of the time become motivated to invent or discover new methods to escape our plateaus. One sign of "invention in progress" is the "dip" in overall performance as new methods are worked out and rehearsed. Successful inventions are signaled by performance "leaps". Unsuccessful ones are characterized by a return to the plateau of stable suboptimal performance.
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Why is it important?
Learning most complex tasks requires the learner to be inventive and explorative. However, these attributes rae seldom stressed or even mentioned. There must always be an accommodation among (a) the learners cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills, (b) the features and measures of the task environment, and (c) the properties of the skill being acquired. All too often, attempts to acquire new skill prematurely plateau -- i.e.., flatten out, before reaching the best performance possible (i.e., before achieving asymptotic performance).
Perspectives
This continues the thread in our research program that began in 2004 with the ``paradox of the active user'' work (DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog2806_2) in the Cognitive Science journal. That work questioned why daily users of software packages never seemed to perform optimally on those packages. That thread has been continued in the Human-Computer Interaction community by researchers such as Lafreniere, Gutwin, & Cockburn (2017 -- see DOI:10.1145/3119928). The PDL paper shows that smooth and steady skill acquisition is an illusion due to averaging over all performers and is NOT a property of individuals.
Professor Wayne D. Gray
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps: Where to Look for Inventions and Discoveries During Skilled Performance, Cognitive Science, October 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12412.
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