The acquisition of procedures from text: A production-system analysis of transfer of training

Abstract

Learning a cognitive skill from written instructions can be viewed as consisting of converting the propositional content of the written material into a representation of procedural knowledge, such as production rules. In a transfer of training experiment, subjects learned from step-by-step instructions a series of related procedures, in different training orders, for operating a simple device. The strong between-procedure transfer effects were predicted by a simple model of transfer in which individual production rules can be transferred or re-used in the representation of a new procedure if they had been used in a previously learned procedure. Apparently, this transfer mechanism acts on declarative propositional representations of the production rules, suggesting that it is more similar to comprehension processes than to conventional practice mechanisms, or to Anderson's learning principles (1982, Psychological Review, 89, 369–406; 1983, The architecture of cognition, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press).