ERIC Number: ED287890
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1987-Apr
Pages: 32
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Mediation and Automatization.
Hutchins, Edwin
This paper discusses the relationship between the mediation of task performance by some structure that is not inherent in the task domain itself and the phenomenon of automatization, in which skilled performance becomes effortless or phenomenologically "automatic" after extensive practice. The use of a common simple explicit mediating device, a checklist, is described in detail. It is assumed that all skilled performances are initially mediated by some structure, either internal or external, and that the terms in the mediating structure provide constraints that can be used to evaluate behavior for its appropriateness. A parallel distributed processing (or "connectionist") view of cognition would lead us to expect that, as a consequence of repeated mediated task performance, a learning network will learn the sequence of states that constitute the task, and with sufficient practice may be able to move through them without the application of the constraints provided by the mediating structure. It is argued that this condition of no-longer-mediated performance is precisely what has been seen as automatized performances, and that the changes that obviate the need for mediation are the processes underlying the development of skill automatization. (Author/LPG)
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Office of Naval Research, Washington, DC. Psychological Sciences Div.
Authoring Institution: California Univ., San Diego, La Jolla. Inst. for Cognitive Science.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A