Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines some characteristics of the learning process in a model of skill learning(Miyata, 1987) in which performance of executing sequential actions becomes increasingly more efficient as a skill is practiced. The model is a hierarchy of sequential PDP networks which was designed to model a shift from a slow, serial performance of a novice to a fast,parallel performance of an expert in tasks such as typing. The network develops representation of a set of sequences as it tries to produce the sequences faster. The model was found to yield the power law of learning (Newell and Rosenbloom, 1981). In addition, it exhibited a frequency effect on substitution errors similar to what was found in typing(Grudin, 1983).