Task-level and Item-level Components of Procedure Speed-up
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alphabet-arithmetic (e.g., B + 4 = C D E F) is a classic, yet still controversial, skill-acquisition task in cognitive science and is a common proxy for learning processes of genuine addition (2 + 4 = 6) in experimental research. We designed the present experiment to distinguish task-general and item-specific components of procedure learning in this task. We tracked alphabet-arithmetic learning in university students across six practice blocks (36 problems per block) replacing 12 old items with 12 new items in each of Blocks 3 and 5. This design was intended to promote use of a counting strategy throughout practice (rather than memorization of problem-answer pairs) and permitted measurement of task-general transfer effects while holding item age constant and item-level transfer with task age constant. Transfer of procedural learning expressed in RT speed-up and fewer errors showed improved performance of task-general mechanisms but also that procedural memory in this experiment encoded item-level problem features to enhance procedure execution. The present findings indicated that such item-level specialization of procedure execution can begin after only a small number of item repetitions even with a relatively large number of different items. As such, these phenomena may provide a useful new benchmark for models of cognitive skill acquisition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".