In
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
, sequence learning is inherent to human ability because it is an integrated part of conscious and nonconscious learning as well as activities. Sequences of information or sequences of actions are used in various everyday tasks: "from sequencing sounds in speech, to sequencing movements in typing or playing instruments, to sequencing actions in driving an automobile."
Sequence learning can be used to study skill acquisition and in studies of various groups ranging from neuropsychological patients to infants.
According to Ritter and Nerb, “The order in which material is presented can strongly influence what is learned, how fast performance increases, and sometimes even whether the material is learned at all.” Sequence learning, more known and understood as a form of explicit learning, is now also being studied as a form of
implicit learning Implicit learning is the learning of complex information in an unintentional manner, without awareness of what has been learned. According to Frensch and Rünger (2003) the general definition of implicit learning is still subject to some controver ...
as well as other forms of learning. Sequence learning can also be referred to as sequential behavior, behavior sequencing, and serial order in behavior.
History
In the first half of the 20th century,
Margaret Floy Washburn
Margaret Floy Washburn (July 25, 1871 – October 29, 1939), leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in ethology, animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to ...
,
John B. Watson
John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school.Cohn, Aaron S. 2014.Watson, John B." Pp. 1429–1430 in ''T ...
, and other
behaviorists
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual' ...
believed behavioral sequencing to be governed by the reflex chain, which states that stimulation caused by an initial movement triggers an additional movement, which triggers another additional movement, and so on. In 1951,
Karl Lashley
Karl Spencer Lashley (June 7, 1890 – August 7, 1958) was a psychologist and behaviorist remembered for his contributions to the study of learning and memory. A ''Review of General Psychology'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Lashley as the 61 ...
, a
neurophysiologist at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, published “The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior,” addressing the current beliefs about sequence learning and introducing his hypothesis. He criticized the previous view on the basis of six lines of evidence:
The first line is that movements can occur even when sensory feedback
Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled c ...
is interrupted. The second is that some movement sequences occur too quickly for elements of the sequences to be triggered by feedback from the preceding elements. Next is that the errors in behavior suggest internal plans for what will be done later. Also, the time to initiate a movement sequence can increase with the length or complexity of the sequence. The next line is the properties of movements occurring early in a sequence can anticipate later features. Then lastly the neural activity can indicate preparation of upcoming behavior events, including upcoming behavior events in the relatively long-term future.
Lashley argued that sequence learning, or behavioral sequencing or serial order in behavior, is not attributable to sensory feedback. Rather, he proposed that there are plans for behavior since the nervous system prepares for some behaviors but not others. He said that there was a
hierarchical organization
A hierarchical organization or hierarchical organisation (see spelling differences) is an organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. This arrangement is a form of a hierarc ...
of plans. He came up with several lines of evidence. The first of these is that the context changes functional interpretations of the same behaviors, such as the way “wright, right, right, rite, and write” are interpreted based on the context of the sentence. “Right” can be interpreted as a direction or as something good depending on the context. A second line of evidence says that errors are involved in human behavior as hierarchical organization. In addition, “hierarchical organization of plans comes from the timing of behavioral sequences.” The larger the phrase, the longer the response time, which factors into “decoding” or “unpacking” hierarchical plans. Additional evidence is how easy or hard it is to learn a sequence. The mind can create a “memory for what is about to happen” as well as a “memory for what has happened.” The final evidence for the hierarchical organization of plans is characterized by
"chunking". This skill combines multiple units into larger units.
Types of sequence learning
There are two broad categories of sequence learning—explicit and implicit—with subcategories. Explicit sequence learning has been known and studied since the discovery of sequence learning. However, recently, implicit sequence learning has gained more attention and research. As a form of
implicit learning Implicit learning is the learning of complex information in an unintentional manner, without awareness of what has been learned. According to Frensch and Rünger (2003) the general definition of implicit learning is still subject to some controver ...
, implicit sequence learning concerns underlying learning methods of which people are unaware—in other words, learning without knowing. The exact properties and number of mechanisms of implicit learning are debated. Other forms of implicit sequence learning include motor sequence learning, temporal sequence learning, and
associative sequence learning.
Sequence learning problems
Sequence learning problems are used to better understand the different types of sequence learning. There are four basic sequence learning problems: sequence prediction, sequence generation, sequence recognition, and sequential decision making. These “problems” show how sequences are formulated. They show the patterns sequences follow and how these different sequence learning problems are related to each other.
Sequence prediction attempts to predict the next immediate element of a sequence based on all the preceding elements. Sequence generation is basically the same as sequence prediction: an attempt to piece together a sequence one by one the way it naturally occurs. Sequence recognition takes certain criteria and determines whether the sequence is legitimate. Sequential decision making or sequence generation through actions breaks down into three variations: goal-oriented, trajectory-oriented, and reinforcement-maximizing. These three variations all want to pick the action(s) or step(s) that will lead to the goal in the future.
These sequence learning problems reflect hierarchical organization of plans because each element in the sequences builds on the previous elements.
In a classic experiment published in 1967,
Alfred L. Yarbus Alfred Lukyanovich Yarbus (Альфред Лукьянович Ярбус; 3 April 1914 in Moscow – 1986) was a Soviet psychologist who studied eye movements in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yarbus pioneered the study of saccadic exploration of complex ...
demonstrated that though subjects viewing portraits reported apprehending the portrait as a whole, their eye movements successively fixated on the most informative parts of the image. These observations suggest that underlying an apparently parallel process of face perception, a serial
oculomotor
The oculomotor nerve, also known as the third cranial nerve, cranial nerve III, or simply CN III, is a cranial nerve that enters the orbit (anatomy), orbit through the superior orbital fissure and innervates extraocular muscles that enable mo ...
process is concealed. It is a common observation that when a
skill
A skill is the learned ability to act with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of wo ...
is being acquired, we are more attentive in the initial phase, but after repeated practice, the skill becomes nearly automatic; this is also known as
unconscious competence
In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill. People may have several skills, some ...
. We can then concentrate on learning a new action while performing previously learned actions skillfully. Thus, it appears that a neural code or representation for the learned skill is created in our brain, which is usually called
procedural memory
Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory (unconscious, long-term memory) which aids the performance of particular types of tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.
Procedural memory guides the processes we perform, ...
. The procedural memory encodes procedures or algorithms rather than facts.
Ongoing research
There are many other areas of application for sequence learning. How humans learn sequential procedures has been a long-standing research problem in
cognitive science and currently is a major topic in
neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...
. Research work has been going on in several disciplines, including
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
,
neural networks
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
, and engineering.
For a philosophical perspective, see
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a body of observations. It consists of making broad generalizations based on specific observations. Inductive reasoning is distinct from ''deductive'' re ...
and
Problem of induction
First formulated by David Hume, the problem of induction questions our reasons for believing that the future will resemble the past, or more broadly it questions predictions about unobserved things based on previous observations. This inferen ...
.
For a theoretical computer-science perspective, see
Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference
Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference is a mathematical proof that if a universe is generated by an algorithm, then observations of that universe, encoded as a dataset, are best predicted by the smallest executable archive of that dataset. T ...
and
Inductive programming
Inductive programming (IP) is a special area of automatic programming, covering research from artificial intelligence and programming, which addresses learning of typically declarative (logic or functional) and often recursive programs from incom ...
.
For a mathematical perspective, see
Extrapolation
In mathematics, extrapolation is a type of estimation, beyond the original observation range, of the value of a variable on the basis of its relationship with another variable. It is similar to interpolation, which produces estimates between know ...
.
References
Further reading
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* {{cite journal, last=Landau, first=Susan M., author2=Mark D'Esposito, year=2006, title=Sequence learning in pianists and nonpianists: An fMRI study of motor expertise, journal=Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, volume=6, issue=3, pages=246–59, url=http://keck.ucsf.edu/~houde/sensorimotor_jc/SMLandau06a.pdf, doi=10.3758/cabn.6.3.246, doi-access=free
Learning
Cognitive science
Cognitive neuroscience
Motor control