Skill Domain

File photo | Credit: Aussie Child Care NetworkOpens in new window

Skills of many and varied types make up a majority of the activities comprising daily life. The word skill is easily and, for the most part, meaningfully understood by almost everyone. When we say that someone is a skilled typist, or a skilled tennis player, or an unskilled driver, everyone understands what we mean.

We can also refer to particular kinds of behaviours as skills. We say that writing is a skill, as are playing the piano, using tools, solving mathematical problems, square dancing, and hitting firstballs. Again, our meaning is clear to everyone.

Do we use the word skill to mean the same thing when we say that Mary is a skilled mathematician and John is a skilled first baseman?

Certainly something about our meaning is the same; in both cases we mean to indicate that our subjects perform their respective skills at a high level of proficiency — Mary gets straight A’s in math and John is on the varsity baseball team. What about Hector, a connoisseur of fine wines, who is so skilled that he can tell the vintage, year, and bottler of any wine just by tasting it. Is he skilled in the same way as are Mary and John?

Mary, John, and Hector are each skilled at their respective area of interest. But it is also clear that what each is skilled at doing is very different. Mary’s skill comes from her capacity to think about abstract symbols and to manipulate them in her head. Hector’s ability to discern various wines indicates a highly developed sense of taste discrimination.

Of course, Hector’s ability to discern various wines comes from a great deal of experience and knowledge about different vintners. So, in his use of knowledge concerning wines, his skill has some things in common with Mary’s (although, if he acquires too much experience at wine sampling, he may not pass many math tests!).

John’s ability, compared to Mary’s and Hector’s, is expressed primarily through bodily movements. He is quick off the ball, can coordinate his limbs to perform complex and exacting movements, and prosesses good catching and throwing abilities. But are John’s skills merely physical?

To be a skilled baseball player, he must also act out of considerable knowledge concerning game situations. Often he must make split-second decisions about a situation and how best to respond—something requiring considerable knowledge on his part. John has also developed keen capabilities at watching a ball fly off of a hitter’s bat, and can quickly and accurately perceive how he must move to catch it.

There are similar elements of skill in each of the examples above, as well as elements of each that are different. Mary, John, and Hector are all highly skilled, but they are skilled at different things. Mary is skilled primarily because of her cognitive abilities; Hector, because of his perceptual awareness; and John, because of his movement capabilities. In the study of skilled behaviour, these specific capacities are called cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills.

The Three Domains of Skill

A skill is initially defined as belonging to one of three domains. A domain is simply a category into which similar things can be grouped.

When defining a skill, our first decision entails deciding whether cognitive, perceptual, or motor capabilities are most necessary to the successful completion of the skill.

Cognitive Skills

A cognitive skill is one in which knowing what to do or how to do it is the most important aspect in accomplishing the skill. Although perceptual and motor elements may make up part of a cognitive skill, understanding and knowing are the most essential capabilities for doing the skill well, and are usually the most difficult to master.

We can define a cognitive skill as one in which success in accomplishing the goals of the skill is primarily determined by an individual’s knowledge and cognitive abilities. Examples of cognitive skills include reading, writing, solving mathematical problems, doing crossword puzzles, memorizing a list of names, constructing a reasoned and persuasive argument, diagnosing an athlete’s injury, computer programming, and calling plays in a football game.

Perceptual Skills

A perceptual skill is one in which the ability to discern, or to discriminate among, sensory stimuli is of primary importance in accomplishing the skill successfully. More simply stated, it is the ability to recognize important things in the environment—that is, to detect information. In accomplishing a perceptual skill, the primary goal of the performer is not in possessing the movement capabilities necessary for acting, but in sensing when and how to act.

Perceptual skills are intricately intertwined with movement skills, such as those found in sports, so that it can sometimes be difficult to separate the contributions of each type of skill to successful performance.

Is the sensory acuity necessary to discern where and when a pitched baseball will cross home plate more or less important than the actual movement patterns required for hitting the ball, for example?

So essential are perceptual abilities in accomplishing most motor skills, in fact, that motor skills are often referred to as perceptual-motor skills. Skill, many skills rely primarily upon an individual’s awareness of sensory stimuli and are therefore grouped under the perceptual domain.

Examples of perceptual skills include selecting good melons at the grocery store, adjusting the colour on a television set, sorting eggs by size, “reading” a defense in football, identifyihng the ingredients in food by taste, maintaining balance when walking on an icy path, and spotting a camouflaged enemy in a woody thicket.

Motor Skills

As we have seen, motor skillsOpens in new window are not performed in isolation from perceptual and cognitive components necessary to task completion. In many of the skills of interest to the movement specialist, however, it is the quality of the movement itself that is of paramount importance.

A motor skill is one in which the primary determinant of success is the quality of movement. For example, a bowler may have no trouble knowing what to do (knock down the pins with the ball) or in perceiving how to do it (the length and width of the bowling lane, the location of pins, and the weight of the bowling ball are constant and easily discernible from trial to trial), but producing the correct movements to accomplish the goal of knocking all 10 pins over with one ball is still a challenge in each frame.

There is a tendency to think of motor skills only in terms of sports skills or other specialized activities. Catching a football, serving a tennis ball, performing a somersault, skate boarding, and square dancing are certainly all motor skills. But we perform motor skills in most of our daily activities—thousands of them forming the essential and routine, meaningful and pedestrian, events that make daily life possible.

Motor skills include washing dishes, brushing your teeth, turning on a lamp, shaking someone’s hand, putting on your clothes in the morning, taking a shower, sitting down and standing up, driving to school, dancing for joy when you get an “A” in organic chemistry, and climbing into bed at night (or for a well-deserved nap after your organic chemistry test).

Many occupations consist of learning to perform specialized motor skills—using machinery, repairing computers or car engines, sorting and stacking items on shelves, playing the piano professionally, wrapping an injured athlete’s ankle, performing surgery, or flying the space shuttle. Even skills that we might first be inclined to consider purely cognitive, like talking and writing, have significant motor elements underlying their successful production (you can think about what you want to say, but speaking requires the sophisticated and finely tuned coordination of muscles within the vocal tract in order to produce words).

As these activities classified as motor skills indicate, many different types of activity rely primarily upon movement for their success.

We should again emphasize that motor skills, as with cognitive and perceptual skills, are so labeled because of the degree to which cognitive, perceptual, or motor elements contribute to the successful accomplishment of task goals.

Few real-world skills do not contain elements of all three domains; it is convenient both theoretically and practically, however, to label skills relative to the major domain responsible for successful goal achievement. Any skill, and perhaps especially a motor skill, is a mosaic of cognitive, perceptual, and motor strands woven and blended together into the rich tapestry of skilled human behaviour (see Figure X-1).

Is Skill Learning Domain Specific?

Given both the differences and similarities of the three domains into which skills can be classified, it is reasonable to ask if cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills are acquired in fundamentally different ways. That is, are there three separate and distinct sets of skill-learning principles, a different set for each domain?

At first it might seem that differences in the primary modality of success in each domain of skill would naturally lead to differences in methods of acquiring each, and in turn differences in the best ways of instructing each.

As we have seen, however, skills are always, at least to some degree, composites of all three domains, so that questions of differences in how each type of skill is acquired are not as clear-cut and easily differentiated as they might on initial reflection seem.

Although there remains some debate on this issue, there is a growing body of evidence that cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills are acquired in essentially the same way (Allman, 1999; Gardner, 1983; Heathcote, Brown, and Mewhort, 2000; Rosenbaum, Carlson, and Gilmore, 2001). Similarities among skills in all three domains include the following (after the ads!):

1. Transfer specificity —Practicing a particular skill generally has little if any influence on other skills (Kramer, Strayer, and Buckley, 1990; Singley and Anderson, 1989)
2. Learning rates—Charting the rate of learning in all three domains results in similar patterns which can all be described by the same mathametical power function rules (i.e., learning in all three domains follows the same mathematical regularities) (Neves and Anderson, 1981; Singley and Anderson, 1989)
3. Learning stages—Learners appear to progress through the same stages of learning regardless of the skill domain (Anderson, 1982; Fitts and Posner, 1967)
4. Individual differences in skill performance—The general correlation between how well individuals perform any two dissimilar skills is highly consistent across all three skill domains (Gardner, 1983)
5. Importance of imagery—Once thought to play a role only in cognitive learning, recent research has revealed the important role imagery plays in the learning of perceptual and motor skills, as well (Billard, 2001; Crammond, 1997; Jeannerod, 1994)
6. Involvement of neural substrates—Recent research has revealed that there is significantly less differentiation than once thought between areas of the brain involvd in generating the three types of skils, especially a more important role of the cerebellum in cognitive as well as perceptual and motor skills than was previously believed (Courchesne and Allen, 1997; Fiez, 1996)

7. Similar training effects—Many similarities exist in the effects of various training regimens on the learning of skills in all three domains, including practice distribution effects, effectiveness of varied practice scheduling, and the roles of instruction and feedback (Schmidt and Bjork, 1992).

The final point just made, that similiarities exist in the training effects of various practice arrangements and methods among all three skill domains, should be especially noted. Problems arise, and relatively ineffective instructional methods frequently follow, when we forget that all three skill domains share more commonalities than differences.

Indeed, advances in neuroscience have led experts from across the spectrum of skill domains to conclude that common neural mechanisms underlie the acquisition of all skills, and even that all skills are performactory in nature. In this view, all skills are related to an action system. Cognition and perception exist fundamentally to subserve action, and are intrinsically linked to the motor system and to the acquisition of motor skills (Smyth and Haggard, 1999; Rosenbaum, Carlson, and Gilmore, 2001).