CHAPTER 18
Procedural Memory and Skill Acquisition
ADDIE JOHNSON
499DECLARATIVE MEMORY AND SKILL ACQUISITION 499
The Roles of Attention and Intention in
Memory and Skill 500
Learning to Ignore Irrelevant Information 501
IMPLICIT LEARNING 502
Implicit Learning and Awareness 502
Implicit Learning and Attention 503
The Nature of Implicit Learning 504
PROCEDURAL MEMORY 504
Evidence for Procedural Memory 505
A Procedural Memory System? 505
PROCEDURAL MEMORY, IMPLICIT LEARNING,
AND SKILL 506
SKILLED PERFORMANCE 506
Phases of Skill Acquisition 506
Mechanisms of Change 507
TYPES OF SKILLS 507
Perceptual Skill 507
Cognitive Skill 508
Motor Skill 509
FACTORS INFLUENCING SKILL ACQUISITION 510
Feedback 510
Practice Schedules 511
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SKILLED
PERFORMANCE 511
EXPERTISE 512
Studying Expertise 513
Characteristics of Expertise 513
Skill and Expertise 513
TRAINING 514
Skill Acquisition and Attentional Strategies 516
Automaticity and Training 516
Team Training 516
RETENTION AND TRANSFER OF SKILL 517
Transfer of Training 517
Long-Term Retention of Skill 517
MODELING SKILL 518
NEW DIRECTIONS 518
REFERENCES 518One of the most remarkable things about human performance
is the regularity, efficiency, and precision with which it com-
monly occurs. Despite the fact that we are presented with a
complex array of stimuli in a constantly changing environ-
ment with a bewildering array of choices, things usually go as
planned. Even in the performance of complex tasks, patterns
of stimuli in the environment are grouped and reacted to in
what appears to be seamless, coordinated ease.
Skilled performance obviously depends on prior experi-
ence, but exactly what must be learned and remembered in
order to develop and exercise skill? What aspects from learn-
ing episodes are important for the development of skill, and
what aspects of memory are involved in this learning? These
are key issues in understanding the development, mainte-
nance, and exercise of skill. Other issues of importance are
the roles of forgetting, the making of mistakes, and attention
in the acquisition and execution of skilled performance. In
this chapter, the roles of explicit, declarative memory in
skilled performance will be considered and contrasted with
the role of implicit, procedural memory.DECLARATIVE MEMORY AND
SKILL ACQUISITIONIt is probably not too daring to say that all major models of
skill acquisition, just as the acquisition of skill, itself, begin
with declarative memory. Declarative memory has been
described as an episodic or recollective memory system
(Squire, 1992), the characterization of which overlaps with
descriptions of episodic and semantic memory (see the chap-
ters in this volume by Nairne; McNamara & Holbrook; and
Roediger & Marsh). Basically, declarative memory refers
to a system that works with verbalizable knowledge. In his