Niels Taatgen - The nature and transfer of cognitive skills: can we explain and predict the effects of brain training?

Is the whole of human cognitive ability an integrated system of knowledge, strategies and skills, or a collection of individual tasks and goals? Even though most people would gravitate towards the former point of view, the methodology of psychology, cognitive science and cognitive modeling is focussed on the latter. The current research tradition is to study individual skills and tasks with little regard for interactions between tasks. To explain and model interaction among tasks, I have developed the primitive information processing elements (PRIMs) theory (Taatgen, in press). In the PRIMs theory, procedural knowledge is broken down into the smallest elements of information processing, which are combined as a new task is learned. The partial productions it learns along the way are general strategies that can be used to learn other tasks, even if there is no surface resemblance among the tasks.

I will demonstrate the theory with a number of examples: a classic transfer between text editors experiment, and a more modern "brain-training" experiment, in which training on task-switching improves performance on a complex working memory task and on the Stroop task. The model explains the latter by an improvement of executive control strategies, and therefore proposes that executive control is better viewed as a set of cognitive strategies rather than an immutable system.

Taatgen, N.A. (in press). The nature and transfer of cognitive skills. Psychological Review.