On Friday, I was reminded of why I was looking for the phrase “in praise of habit” earlier.  This summer, in July, I started biking to work every day and locking my bike to one of the racks in front of the Psych dept building.  About a week ago, for the first time, I found myself up in the office with no memory of having locked the bike — leading to the observation that either I’ve established a habit or I’ll be walking home.  Fortunately, the bike was there (locked) when I left.

Then Friday, I walked out the front door and realized I didn’t even know where the bike was parked.  I went to the wrong rack (of two) and had to double back to find it.

That’s 3 months of daily biking, minus a little vacation, meaning around 50 repetitions of the bike-locking habit until it becomes routinized enough not to leave an explicit trace.  I think that lines up pretty well with the log-linear learning rates we’ve been observing with SISL sequence repetitions and how many reps it takes to be statistically reliable.  Nice.

BTW, rather than bemoan my own increasing absent-mindedness (because that ship has already sailed), I would spin this effect as in praise of habit because the routinization implies that my high-order cognitive processes are free to work on more interesting things (grants, papers, fantasy football) rather than guiding me through the bike-locking procedure.  As long as I can find my bike when I’m heading home in the evening, anyway.

As I noted in lab meeting, I was somewhat captured by the fact that James and Cajal were doing their seminal works at around the same historical time. I don’t know as much about Cajal as maybe I should, so I was a bit surprised by this bit of bio (from Wikipedia):

The son of physician and anatomy lecturer Justo Ramón and Antonia Cajal, Ramón y Cajal was born of Aragonese parents in Petilla de Aragón in Navarre, Spain. As a child he was transferred between many different schools because of his poor behavior and anti-authoritarian attitude. An extreme example of his precociousness and rebelliousness is his imprisonment at the age of eleven for destroying the town gate with a homemade cannon. He was an avid painter, artist, and gymnast. He worked for a time as a shoemaker and barber, and was well known for his pugnacious attitude.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal

Imprisoned in the 1860s at age 11 for blowing up the town gate with a homemade cannon? There’s some quality anti-authoritarianism.

It used to be that learning a skill required hours of painstaking practice, whereby one would attempt a feat over and over again while making fine-tuned adjustments to one’s performance. If you fell off your bike, you would climb back on. Then we were introduced to training wheels and self-balancing front wheels. Now it’s nigh impossible to stumble off your wheeled perch. Well, golf has one more tool to add to its list of products that make skill development hopefully simpler.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/sensor-laden-sensoglove-helps-you-make-smarter-decisions-than-ti/

It’s curious to think how precise we can get with feedback regarding skill development. At what point does the humanity cease to be important to skill execution? The human still needs to accept the feedback given and adjust performance, but I wonder how this affects the general acquisition of skills. Does acquiring skills with such a precise form of feedback, as opposed to loose guidelines regarding stance and adjusting when your ball goes flying off course, change anything about how the skill is represented or the rate at which the skill is acquired?

My general lack of abilities requiring skill doesn’t make me suited to answer that question, but it does make me curious.

I found this Gizmodo article, which I found amusing since it was something that was recently brought up.

http://gizmodo.com/5645331/why-do-humans-love-spicy-self+torture

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21peppers.html?_r=1

However, after recently being naive to a great deal of wasabi in my soy sauce , I tend to believe that the joy of spice is reserved for people prepared for it.

I was going to note something else, but due to a vague sense of familiarity, I googled the title and re-discovered the truism: the seeds of almost all interesting ideas in psychology were first described by William James.

The Principles of Psychology is online and I think we should consider Chapter 4, Habit required reading for the lab.

Motivational quotes:

Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity [2] of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed.

Yes, this.

The first result of it is that habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue.

Man in born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made arrangements for in his nerve-centres. Most of the performances of other animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry plight.

James takes habits into the realm of morality as well:

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t count this time!’ Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

And lest you think James’ 19th century insight precludes 21st century psychological research, he does occasionally get one wrong:

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Not so!  And importantly, for understanding adult acquisition of skills throughout the lifespan.

P.S. “In praise of habit” doesn’t actually occur in James’ chapter.  Things that include that phrase cite him, though.  Maybe it was in one of the Graybiel reviews?  Aristotle is even older school than James, science-wise.

I wasn’t looking for skill learning examples, I was trying to do some actual skill learning. Specifically, I was thinking about improving my quite lame guitar playing. I picked up an instructional DVD (from a guitar player/teacher I had discovered on youtube) and accidentally discovered an example of how a skill teacher might describe skill learning to capture the interplay of conscious and implicit learning. I couldn’t resist grabbing the description as a 2-minute segment:

In case you’re wondering, this is what he plays that first got my attention on youtube. The DVD promises that I, too, can learn to play like this. I’m working on it but not holding my breath.

Update: I think I should probably add in a link to Adam Rafferty’s site since he has one.

Yet another paper that suggests that video game aficionados can become cognitively super-human. (Maybe a bit over-exaggerated, but good news for gamers nonetheless)

Improved Probabilistic Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games
C. Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget, Daphne Bavelier
Current Biology, 20(17), 1573-1579

Walked past my son watching the Mythbusters episode: No Pain, No Gain.  It includes 3 studies of pain tolerance/perception using holding your hand in ice water as the pain stimulus.  The one that really got my attention is the swearing one — does cursing out loud increase one’s tolerance for pain?

They found a positive result, but I hope my research methods class will be able to identify ways in which their methodology was not ideal.

Mythbusters: No Pain, No Gain, Part 1
(ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPEaoone8j4)

Mythbusters: No Pain, No Gain, Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL02CneOPE4&feature=related

(I would have liked to link directly to the Discovery Channel website for the episode, but they seem to make extra footage available, but not the actual episode as far as I can tell).

The source of the hypothesis appears to be this report, which I think is pretty solid on methodology (note: I had to log in through the University library to get the full report, NeuroReport doesn’t give away content for free).

http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/abstract/2009/08050/swearing_as_a_response_to_pain.4.aspx

We are going to be talking about “flow,” I think, in characterizing our sequence learning work.  So, some points of contact for reference:

Ericsson & Ward (2007) in their report about capturing expert performance in the lab, include this quote towards the end:

“It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (‘‘flow’’, as described by Mihaly Csıkszentmihalyi, 1990) during their performance.”

The man with the unpronounceable name is often cited about the concept of “flow.”  His wikipedia page is an interesting read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

It cites his “seminal work” as:  Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0-06-092043-2

We have observed some increased activity in ventral striatum areas (near the nucleus accumbens) during periods of performance with higher levels of accuracy.  This could reflect reward-related activity possibly associated with something like “flow” (n.b., we’re speculating here).   We have also observed a “hot hand” effect in behavioral performance — getting a response correct is likely to be followed by additional correct responses, possible creating sequences of high-performance “flow.”

The idea of flow pops up in video game playing in general and is likely related.  A video game author, Jenova Chen, has been explicitly trying to capture “flow” in various games.  She has published a popular and fairly simple flash game called “flOw,” but another game by her company called “Flower” caught my attention:

http://thatgamecompany.com/games/flower/
Youtube trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcU8Yw43BuU
Youtube gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUC2tpY5gb4

The gameplay video is what I found first of hers and made me wonder if between the first person perspective and sense of flow, whether experience with this game would enhance visuo-spatial abilities like some other video games do.

I should also note that the Ericsson & Ward (2007) quote is being taken slightly out of context.  They actually follow it by saying that flow is not part of skill learning:

“These states are, however, incompatible with deliberate practice, in which individuals engage in a (typically planned) training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.”

I’d disagree with this statement about flow and skill acquisition being incompatible (flow seems to imply dopamine, which ought to be good for dopamine-gated plasticity in cortico-striatal circuits, one would think).  But I don’t disagree with the idea that top-down (deliberate) control may be helpful in many skill learning contexts.  Before you can learn a skill (or habit) you have to be able to step through the proper sequence and it’s probably faster to do this deliberately than laboriously chain a long sequence of trail-an-error learning through some crazy TD algorithm.

Perhaps more random than usual, but I’ve been meaning to collect some snippets of language that stick in my mind.  Language is sequential (of course) and seems to be highly statistical (although there’s debate) but it also seems to sometimes trigger that sense of “flow” we think about in expertise.

This is an oldie, but goodie, has “flow” (IMHO) and is therefore a good place to start.  If I decide to post other language examples, it might get even more eclectic…

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Left as an exercise to the reader: how does the sequential nature and our prior sequence learning in language affect or create our ability to “understand” the neologisms like “brillig” or “slithy toves”?