Procedural Learning
Procedural Learning Definition and Overview
Procedural learning refers to the capacity to progressively and automatically acquire motor, verbal, or cognitive skills by optimally executing a series of actions and organized procedures.
Procedural learning is defined as a training-induced change in performance for a given task, in which repeating a complex activity leads to an automatic—and often unconscious—production of highly adaptive behavior or skill.
Procedural learning thus encompasses knowledge for important processes involved in skill acquisition and the formation of expertise.
Procedural learning—also known as skill learning—captures the idea that learning is expressed as facilitation of the procedures involved in task performance. It coincides with procedural memory Opens in new window which is a nondeclarative Opens in new window form of long-term memory Opens in new window that reflects the ability of the organism to store knowledge about “how to do” something.
In most case, procedural learning and procedural memory Opens in new window are non-verbal forms of learning and memory. This form of knowledge cannot easily be expressed in words, but rather is illustrated in the act of performing the skilled task activity.
A distinction is often made between knowing how and knowing that. For example, when learning to ride a bicycle, one is aware of learning, but the knowledge one can verbalize is not supporting performance or the how.
In other cases, the structure to be learned is not explicitly signaled, but embedded incidentally in the task being performed. As such skills differ from other types of memory because memory must be assessed by performance of the task itself.
Overview of Skill Learning
The overview of skill learning is grouped into motor, verbal perceptual, and cognitive skills, reflecting how the tasks used to assess skill learning have been classified rather than a true division of psychological or neural processes supporting performance.
- Motor Learning
Motor learning Opens in new window is evaluated with many different tasks. Tasks often used are the pursuit rotor test, the serial reaction-time test, and mirror drawing.
- In the pursuit rotor test, the subject learns to maintain contact between a stylus and a circular spot located on a rotating disk (Ammons, 1947).
- In the serial reaction-time test, subjects improve their speed at pressing buttons in different locations on a keyboard, according to an implicit sequence (Nissen and Bullemer 1987).
- In mirrow drawing, subjects draw the outline of a form, when all visual input is mirror-reversed (Milner 1962).
Motor learning Opens in new window is affected by basal ganglia dysfunction in the context of Parkinson’s disease Opens in new window and Huntington’s disease Opens in new window.
Lesions within the supplementary motor area, the adjacent anterior cingulate, and the anterior insular region also disrupt motor skill learning (Kornhuber et al. 1995).
Patients with cerebellar lesions are selectively impaired in learning motor sequences. These patients fail the motor learning tasks, despite relatively preserved recognition of the task procedure (Heindel et al. 1989).
- Perceptual Learning
Verbal perceptual learning Opens in new window is tested with mirror reading, in which subjects improve their speed at reading mirror-reversed words. On the basis of this task Cohen and Squire (1980) showed that amnesic patients were able to normally improve their performance through repeated execution of the task.
Patients with Alzheimer’s disease Opens in new window fail to acquire mirror-reading skills, suggesting that the temporo-parietal association cortex is involved in verbal skill learning (Heindel et al. 1989).
Demented Huntington patients Opens in new window are also impaired at acquiring skills. However, they normally recognize the stimuli, showing a clear dissociation with amnesic patients (Martone et al. 1984).
- Cognitive Learning
Cognitive learning is the capacity to improve strategies in cognitive tasks through repetition.
Figure X-1: Tower of Hanoi | Source: Wikipedia Opens in new window
The Tower of Hanoi Opens in new window, London, or Toronto tests are classically used to test cognitive learning (Saint-Cyr et al. 1988). For instance, the Tower of Hanoi is a tower of eight disks piled on one of three pegs placed in front of the subject.
The objective is to transfer the tower to another peg, with a minimum number of moves and respecting several rules, such as to move only one disk at a time and to never place a large disk on a small disk. With repetition of the task, there is a decrease in the number of moves, errors, and time needed for executing the task.
Controversial accounts of cognitive learning capacities have been reported in amnesia Opens in new window. Xu and Corkin (2001) suggested that cognitive learning is not a pure form of implicit memory Opens in new window and that episodic memory Opens in new window plays a role in the acquisition of strategies in the Tower of Hanoi problem.
However, Beaunieux et al. (1998) demonstrated that an amnesic patient showed cognitive learning on the Tower of Hanoi when the examiner provided compensation for declarative memory difficulties, by repeating the rules during the test and showing pictures of the initial and final position of the disks.
