Chunking

From LearnLab
Jump to: navigation, search

Chunking

The process by which knowledge components are reorganized into larger structures and become functional in performance. Fluency is facilitated by the acquisition of new chunks and the refinement of currently existing chunks.

Relevant theories include Newell's Soar, Anderson's ACT-R, Simon's EPAM, Grossberg’s avalanche, the linguistic theory of constructions, MacWhinney's Competition model, and others. The Competition Model treats a word as a nexus of information on the articulatory, auditory, lexical, and syntactic levels, an associations of chunks. It proposes a specific account of chunk development. Learning begins with item-based chunks specific to particular words with slots open for argument fillers. Refinement then works to generalize these slots. Next, item-based chunks are generalized into constructions. Then constructions are then generalized into global patterns. First language learning involves a process of generalization moving across these phases. Over time, these chunks and patterns become entrenched to maximize interoperability between chunks

  • Asch, S. E. (1968). The Doctrinal Tyranny of Associationism: or What is Wrong with Rote Learning. In T. R. Dixon & D. L. Horton (Eds.), Verbal behavior and general behavior theory (pp. 214-228). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  • Asch, S. E., & Ebenholtz, S. M. (1962). The principle of associative symmetry. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 135-163.
  • Bower, G. H., & Winzenz, D. (1969). Group structure, coding, and memory for digit series. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80(2, Pt.2), 1-17.
  • Horowitz, L. M., Brown, Z. M., & Weissbluth, S. (1964). Availability and the direction of associations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(6), 541-549.
  • Horowitz, L. M., Norman, S. A., & Day, R. S. (1966). Availability and associative symmetry. Psychological Review, 73(1), 1-15.
  • Jones, G. V. (1976). A fragmentation hypothesis of memory: Cued recall of pictures and of sequential position. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(3), 277-293.
  • Gobet, F. (1998). Expert memory: A comparison of four theories. Cognition, 66(2), 115-152.
  • Gobet, F., Lane, P. C. R., Croker, S., C-H Cheng, P., Jones, G., Oliver, I., et al. (2001). Chunking mechanisms in human learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(6), 236-243.
  • Murdock, B. B. (1993). TODAM2: A model for the storage and retrieval of item, associative, and serial-order information. Psychological Review, 100(2), 183-203.
  • Wickelgren, W. A. (1979). Chunking and consolidation: A theoretical synthesis of semantic networks, configuring in conditioning, S-R versus cognitive learning, normal forgetting, the amnesic syndrome, and the hippocampal arousal system. Psychological Review, 86(1), 44-60.