Automaticity

The Development of Automaticity

There are generally considered to be three phases in skill learning: cognitive-verbal-motor, associative, and autonomous. In the cognitive-verbal-motor-stage, learning is largely under cognitive, conscious control. The learner has to understand what is required to undertake the task and carries it out while consciously providing self-instruction. In the associative stage, the learner begins to put together a sequence of responses that become more fluent over time. Errors are detected and eliminated. While learning to play an instrument, feedback from the sounds produced and the teacher play an important role in the process. In the autonomous stage, the skill becomes automated, is carried out without conscious effort, and continues to develop each time it is used, becoming more fluent and quicker. In musical performance, many skills are acquired simultaneously, and new skills constantly being added. As mastery of more advanced skills is acquired, skills learned earlier are continuously practiced so they achieve greater automaticity. As one set of skills is becoming increasingly automated, others are at the associative and cognitive stages.

For virtually every task, performance improves with practice, with the greatest improvement occurring early in training. Associations developed through practice are strengthened. There is some evidence that in the long term, skills can plateau before continuing to improve. There may be gradual improvement through association up to a certain point, but to gain greater efficiency beyond this point may require a change in processes. This may be linked to what is known as “chunking” when processing is carried out with ever-larger groups of elements. For instance, in reading musical notation, skilled readers do not fixate on each note; their fixations are directed across line and phrase boundaries, scanning ahead and returning to the current point of performance. They can continue to read about six or seven notes after removal of the printed page, while poor readers only manage about three or four.

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