Deliberate Practice and Perceptual Learning

At the highest levels of performance, genetics and innate factors matter because everyone is practicing the same amount; in other fields and at lower levels of performance a combination of genetics, opportunities, and environment affect individual performance just as much as the number of hours spent in effective practice.

… the data indicate that there is an enormous amount of variability in deliberate practice—even in elite performers. One player in Gobet and Campitelli's (2007) chess sample took 26 years of serious involvement in chess to reach a master level, while another player took less than 2 years to reach this level. Some normally functioning people may never acquire expert performance in certain domains, regardless of the amount of deliberate practice they accumulate. ... This conclusion runs counter to the egalitarian view that anyone can achieve most anything he or she wishes, with enough hard work.

Deliberate vs Normal Practice

Deliberate practice does work, but it’s really difficult to turn the principles into a practice program if you are in a field where no ‘highly-developed, broadly accepted training methods’ exist

Purposeful practice consists of the following principles:

Purposeful practice has to be focused. You should not be able to think of your next meal while undertaking it.

Purposeful practice should take you out of your comfort zone. It should feel painful to do. As I’ve mentioned earlier, playing a piece of music you already know how to play, and writing a program that utilises techniques you already know do not count for the purpose of mastery. Practice that makes you better should take maximal effort, and thus feel terribly unpleasant

Purposeful practice requires feedback, and adjustments to technique after getting the feedback. It is most effective if the feedback loop is short

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals

Deliberate practice adds a small number of principles to this:

First, it demands that the practice be conducted in a field with well-established training techniques

Second, it demands that practice be guided in the initial stages by a teacher or coach. As the student improves, her ability to form accurate mental models will also improve; these models allow her to eventually practice on her own.

Third, and last, deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically

Problems

Sub-skills are ill defined. A lot of tacit knowledge is just these subskills that are hard to master

A lot of difficulties emerge from lack of feedback

Some problems emerge from a lack of opportunities for practice

You can burnout if you feel you're not progressing/motivated — the constantly shifting goalposts add a lot of anxiety

Perceptual Learning

Perceptual Learning is the process of learning something by observing what something done right looks like.

Perceptual Exposure leads to Perceptual Learning, which leads to Expertise. This expertise is Tacit Knowledge. You can't explicitly communicate it.

When the British were teaching plane spotters to spot German planes in WW2

"It was a grim attempt. The spotters tried to explain their strategies but failed. No one got it, not even the spotters themselves. Like the chicken sexers, the spotters had little idea how they did what they did — they simply saw the right answer."

"With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise."

In a study involving pilots "PLMs (Perceptual Learning Modules) produced dramatic improvements in speed and accuracy for both non-pilots and pilots. Pilots initially outperformed non-pilots. Non-pilots after 1-2 hours of PLM training were as accurate and faster than pilots before training in both PLMs."

In other words, non-pilots with no experience of flight, aeronautics and instrumentation matched experienced pilots with hundreds of hours of training, after only 120 minutes of perceptual learning!

Rules of Perceptual Learning

Caveats:

knowledge learnt by perceptual exposure is task specific

perceptual learning is about tacit knowledge. It's really hard to articulate to others

The Key to perceptual learning it to show users a large number of diverse, positive examples in a compressed time "This doesn’t mean we can’t teach using examples of bad, but the best, safest place for that approach is long after the learner develops strong perceptual knowledge for what’s good. Once they’re reliable at perceiving good, they’ll automatically recognize bad as “that which doesn’t fit the pattern” (even if they can’t explain why)."

First, you need a large number of superficially diverse, positive examples. It’s better to have a selection of small but good examples, instead of longer, bigger chunks. Smaller chunks allow you to work through more examples in the same period of time. So: pick smaller snippets of code, or little snatches of essays, instead of complete programs or long articles, ones that take hours to finish reading.

Put these examples into a Digital Notebook to create a Perceptual Exposure Playlist. Then, go through it at a leisurely pace, never spending more than a couple of minutes per example. Don’t reflect, don’t think, just browse.

Close your playlist and move on. One tricky thing is that during this exercise, you probably wouldn't feel as if you’ve learnt anything consciously. What you’re trying to improve is a subconscious sense of ‘good'.

Schedule updated sessions to create new playlists, and review old ones. As your perceptual abilities improves, you should find that your evaluation of old playlists will shift over time

Drawbacks

In the months since, I’ve noticed one major problem with this method: whenever I notice a particularly good use of narrative, I would find it difficult to use (much less remember!) that segue in my writing without first attempting it explicitly. It does seem like perceptual exposure isn’t as effective as, well, actual practice.

I could be missing the point here, though. A large part of writing ability is subconscious — when I write, I am able to transform thoughts into words without much awareness of how this process happens. It may well be that I’ve absorbed the essence of such narrative techniques without explicitly recognising that they are now part of my repertoire. What if I’ve improved as a result of my perceptual exposure but am not aware of it? Isn’t that the main claim of perceptual exposure practice, after all?

The answer is that I don’t know, and I may never know

We’ve got a measurement problem with perceptual exposure practice, one that I'm not sure can be avoided.

I bring this up because deliberate practice is way more visceral — you know you’re getting better, because DP is so painful to do. After awhile, the pain can become enjoyable the same way that exercise is enjoyable, because you know you are getting better at whatever skill you’re trying to improve.

I’m downgrading my recommendation of perceptual exposure as a form of standalone practice. I think that for any serious effort at mastery, perceptual exposure can only play a secondary role in skills development. Better to focus on deliberate practice, along with other forms of explicit practice.