Acquisition of Cognitive Skill: Do We Already Have a Theory?
Stellan Ohlsson · 2009
Background The acquisition of cognitive skill is studied in artificial intelligence, cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, robotics and other cognitive sciences. Researchers have produced multiple, apparently competing theories. I argue that the seemingly diverse theoretical proposals are in fact components of a unified theory and that the latter is already in a technical sense complete. Framework for a Unified Theory Improvements in a skill cannot come out of thin air. A learning mechanism takes information of some sort as input. For example, generalization might take a rule but also some positive examples as input and produce a more general version of that rule (Information Dependence). Information that might be available in a skill learning scenario comes in different types, and each type requires a