http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/867263731

Optimizing the Long Term Retention of Skills: Structural and Analytic Approaches to Skill Maintenance

This research program seeks to identify the characteristics of knowledge and skill which are most resistant to decay due to disuse. Our research can be divided into two complementary parts. The first part is concerned with experimental analysis of factors influencing and improving retention of skill components. The second part is concerned with analysis and assessment of the structure of acquired memory and skills and how to monitor differential retention of components. For the analytic approach we developed five laboratory methodologies, and we completed investigations for each of them. We also identified four natural skills and completed investigations for each of them. For the structural approach we designed an experimental paradigm which allows us to assess the detailed encoding of new knowledge at presentation and at delay using verbal report techniques and chronometric measurement of retrieval components. Several studies of retention of vocabulary items were completed. In a number of our lines of investigation, we found evidence for a surprising degree of long-term skill retention. We formulated a theoretical framework, focusing on the importance of procedural reinstatement, and this framework enables us to understand this impressive memory performance. In contrast, in other studies we have conducted, we found considerable forgetting over even relatively short retention intervals. We have been able to place these studies in the same general theoretical framework developed to account for permastore, and we have been able to derive from these studies indications of the specific factors which facilitate retention. (sdw).

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