Thoughts about automaticity

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This is a collection of responses to discussion posts during week six for 6411 Cognition and Learning relating to both bike riding, driving a standard ‘stick’ automobile and learning a second language.

Response ONE:

I like this description of chunking as being similar to a collection of individual ingredients under ONE label like spaghetti sauce, so it pulls individual elements into a more memorable mental grocery list. I’m not sure caching is the same, mostly because it is described in terms of motor behaviours such as stopping a car at a red light, which can be done automatically without paying conscious attention, depending on the situation or location. For me, stopping at a red light in Midland is definitely more dependent on automaticity than stopping at a red light in downtown Toronto. Just like my drive home from the university – it’s a 40 min drive I do on autopilot unless there are unusual weather events or sudden changes in traffic. If I try to describe a similar cognitive scenario involving caching, perhaps it would be the automaticity of writing using my computer – putting a series of words together into a sentence. I don’t think of the individual letters since they are cached into automatic actions of my fingers on my keyboard, so when I type, it’s a cascading flurry of action, which may not be the same for others who use a hunt and peck type of typing.

To answer your question, I think that abstraction is built on automaticity. Both Willingham (2009) and Smarter Every Day (2015) suggest that actions in bike riding are shallow, since understanding is limited.  I think automaticity is involved because I don’t need to understand the physics or engineering principles behind the cache of automatic actions that allow me to balance, pedal, or move a bike forward.  Moors & De Hauwer (2006) describe the features of automaticity such as “unintentional, uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven, unconscious, efficient and fast” (p. 297). All of these features can be found in practiced bike riding behaviours, at least if you’re like my husband who requires no conscious cognition as he’s biking. Suggested features of abstraction include being non-concrete, or being conceptions that are not physically or perceptually constrained (McRae, Nedjadrusul, Pau, Lo, & King, 2018). Willingham (2009) considers abstraction as seeing how the whole system works, or having a deeper understanding of how one part would change the actions of the whole system. In bike riding, I don’t necessarily see or understand the abstract concepts or physics involved in why I fall over when I stop pedalling. It’s an automatic reaction to put my feet down when I stop pedalling so I don’t fall over. But, in order to understand abstract concepts like balance and momentum, my experience with the automaticity of biking as an analogy is helpful. Thus, abstraction is built on automaticity. I wonder what the brain scan would look like for regular bike riding vs the backward biking brain scans?

Response TWO:

Your driving experience mirrors my own. Most times I can drive home from the university and realize that I don’t remember the details of my trip. But when the weather changes, that automaticity is less reliable. Maybe that’s why there are so many accidents when the first snow fall occurs. Our automatic braking patterns on dry pavement become unreliable and require attention and cognition. Your example also makes me think of the difference people experience, as a seasoned driver, when learning how to drive standard vs automatic vehicles. All those automatic behaviours become disassociated, as Haith & Krakauer (2018) suggest, and require the development of new caches of behaviours. It would be interesting to write the ‘code’ for stopping at a red light in an automatic vehicle vs seeing the code for stopping at a red light in a vehicle with standard transmission. Or even seeing the brain scans of people who are practiced ‘stick’ drivers vs those who haven’t had much practice driving standard vehicles. (My moment of melancholy over the lost art of driving stick!) For my classmates who may not be familiar with this term, “driving stick” refers to the gear stick that is found in cars/trucks with a standard transmission. It’s rare to find vehicles with standard transmission these days since you pay more to have this feature in a new car.

Response THREE:

I think its a progression and balance of both. I’ll use my son’s karate example since this mirrors what I remember seeing when my daughters were developing their hockey skills. He trains the same basic katas over and over, pretty much every time he trains, but it is blended with training some of the intricate, detailed katas that are required for him to test for a 4th degree black belt. The basics hone the automaticity of proprioceptive memory, my son calls it zen, the moment when thinking is no longer required. I think it’s similar to what Haith and Krakauer (2018) reference this as cascading caches. Interjecting the novel routines, helps the brain take a break from the basic, thus giving it time to consolidate the basics, but also build new skills on those basics. Similarly, I think hockey coaches tend to drill the basic skating skills, to build speed and dexterity, but insert intricate drills to maintain interest and motivation.

Response FOUR:

You’ve made me chuckle. I was automatically reading through your response, sort of on autopilot and got caught with an unusual sentence. Now I’m going to have to pay more attention as I read since I’m not sure what to expect next – sort of like driving on autopilot and driving into a snow streamer. You wrote the “human brain, from the beginning of life until the moment you are reading this answer, is the result of constant evolution (Boyd, 2015).” I wonder if anyone else found that gem in your response or just read over it, automatically. Novelty is an important trigger to push us out of automaticity and break the habitual actions. Here’s hoping the novelty on your drive to work isn’t something that causes too much distraction or detracts from the enjoyment of the trip. Thanks for triggering that novelty.

Reference

Haith, A. M., & Krakauer, J. W. (2018). The multiple effects of practice: Skill, habit and reduced cognitive load. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 20, 196-201.

McRae, K., Nedjadrasul, D., Pau, R., Lo, B. P., & King, L. (2018). Abstract concepts and pictures of real‐world situations activate one another. Topics in Cognitive Science, 10(3), 518-532.

Moors, A. & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297-326.

Smarter Every Day. (2015, April 24). The backwards brain bike: Smarter every day 133. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0

Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school?San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Image Attribution: Photo by Alok Sharma on Unsplash