The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning (SL). Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been tested by systematic empirical studies on the developmental pathways of SL from childhood to old age. In this paper, we challenge the view that childhood and early school years are the prime time for skill learning by tracking age-related changes in performance in three different paradigms of SL. We collected data from participants between 7 and 87 years for (1) a Serial Reaction Time Task (SRT) testing the learning of motor sequences, (2) an Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) task testing the extraction of regularities from auditory sequences, and (3) Probabilistic Category Learning in the Weather Prediction task (WP), a non-sequential categorization task. Results on all three tasks show that adolescence and adulthood are the most efficient periods for skill learning, since instead of becoming less and less effective with age, SL improves from childhood into adulthood and then later declines with aging.
The Weather Prediction (WP) Task is a classical task of probabilistic category learning generally used for examining the dissociation of procedural and declarative memory. The current study focuses on performance of children with language impairment (LI) and compares their performance to that of typically developing (TD) children and adults with the aim of testing the procedural deficit hypothesis of LI (PDH; Ullman & Pierpont, 2005), which states that language impairment is not a specific linguistic phenomenon, but results from the dysfunction of a more general cognitive system: the procedural system. To test the generality of the procedural impairment, we needed a task that is dissimilar from language in that it does not build on sequential information. Children with language impairment show deficient learning on the Weather Prediction Task, which already appears at the early stages of the task. These results, in line with the PDH, point to the deficit of the procedural system in language impairment going beyond the language system. Whether this deficit is selective to the procedural system or is complemented by deficits in the declarative system is the subject of future studies.
A verbális munkamemória feladata a „beszédszerű”információk átmeneti tárolása és frissítése, kapacitásában jelentős egyéni különbségek figyelhetőek meg, amelyek egy sor kognitív funkció működését modulálják. A verbális munkamemória kapacitásának felmérésére számos diagnosztikai eszköz vált széles körben alkalmazottá, de ezek magyar nyelvű változatai eddig csak szórványos kísérleti vizsgálatokban láttak napvilágot. A verbális munkamemória-tárolási és -frissítési komponensei rendkívüli módon érzékenyek az adott információ hosszúságára, kimondási idejére, fonológiai szerveződésére, így az elsősorban angol nyelvű eszközök mutatói csak korlátozottan voltak használhatóak a magyar nyelvű vizsgálatok számára. Kutatócsoportunk ezt a hiányt pótolta, amikor elkészítette a három legismertebb verbális munkamemória-feladat: a számterjedelmi teszt, az álszóteszt és az olvasásterjedelmi teszt magyar nyelvű változatait. Ebben a tanulmányban a feladatsorokkal együtt közreadjuk a feladatokkal kapcsolatos normatív adatokat is.
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