Key Concepts in Learning and Performance

From The ABC's of How We Learn Ch. X:

excitement - a physiological state of heightened arousal. It comes with increased heart rate increased blood pressure moist palms focused attention higher emotion. Moderate levels of arousal improve performance and memory encoding.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law describes the relation between arousal and performance (Yerkes & Dodson 1908). For simple tasks arousal pushes performance until it reaches a plateau where performance cannot increase any more. For difficult tasks too much arousal hurts performance. Being too excited can cause a loss of focus and even a crash and burn for complex tasks.

Scientists have yet to agree on how emotion and arousal interact to influence learning. There are very many emotions to investigate including sadness joy and anger. The scope of Chapter X was limited to describing general states of arousal irrespective of emotional valence.

self-efficacy - people's belief that they have what it takes to accomplish a goal

People regularly make motivation-relevant attributions that reveal the Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross 1977).

For example

schema - a general representation for a common class of situations. People have a schema for eating out that includes sitting down ordering food eating and paying the bill (and maybe tipping).

Sleep’s relevance to learning is twofold:

  1. alertness to feed attention which can store new memories during the day
  2. memory consolidation at night to facilitate pattern-matching by integrating with prior knowledge during the day

Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is named after these slow (for the brain at least) on-off oscillations. Researchers know SWS is related to learning because the waves are stronger after a day of heavy learning (after studying for finals) and weaker if not much learning has occurred (a lazy summer day).

They also show up in predictable brain locations. If a person learns a motor routine during the day like a finger-tapping pattern then areas of the brain responsible for movement processing will show increased amplitude of sleep oscillations compared with a day of little motor learning (Huber Ghilardi Massimini & Tononi 2004).

Sleeping more can also lead to decreased forgetting and greater athletic performance.

A classic study showed that after learning nonsense syllables taking a nap helps people to forget less than staying awake does. Even when tested as little as one hour after learning participants forgot more syllables if they stayed awake than if they napped during that hour (Jenkins & Dallenbach 1924). Interestingly different types of memory seem to be boosted preferentially during different sleep stages: emotional implicit and procedural memory may be boosted during REM sleep while declarative memory and insight learning may benefit more from SWS.

Mah Mah Kezirian and Dement (2011) asked Stanford University basketball players to extend their nighttime sleep by two hours to a minimum of ten hours in bed (alone) per night for about six weeks. Mah and colleagues found improvement in sprint times free-throw percentage and three-point shot success even though the athletes reported already feeling at the peak of their athletic skill before the start of the study.