Power Law of Practice
Power Law of Practice
Subject universality is often considered necessary evidence of
architectural
mechanisms of behavior. One such universal observation
from psychology is the power law of practice. This law simply states
that the logarithm of the reaction time for a particular task decreases
linearly with the logarithm of the number of practice trials taken.
Qualitatively, the law simply says only that practice improves performance.
However, the quantitative statement of the law and its applicability
to a wide-variety of different human behaviors -- immediate-response
tasks, motor-perceptual tasks, recall tests, text editing, and more
high-level, deliberate tasks such as game-playing -- have suggested
it as an architectural result of
learning.
For example, the power of law
of practice has been called upon repeatedly to
demonstrate the psychological validity of Soar's learning mechanism,
chunking.
Rational Analysis
As an application of
rational analysis, Anderson argues that
the power law of practice is an environmental and not architectural
constraint.
Assumptions
- Need probabilities are distributed according to Zipf's law.
- Desirability is a gamma function.
- Usage decays exponentially. This is a mechanistic assumption and
is made with a priori notions of mechanism.
- Retrievals are a Poisson process.
(Several of these assumptions are discussed by
Simon in a response to this work.)
List of Theories
Table of Contents.
Current Location: Common Descriptions - Theory - Power Law of Practice