| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The power law of practice tells that a log-log plot of task times against the task number gives a straight line. However, these supposedly straight lines tend to accompany a large amount of noises.Often conceived by the participants of the practice experiments as slumps. A long-term goal of this mechanisms of skill acquisition. As a first step toward the goal, a paper-folding task according to the Japanese "origami"tradition was repeated for an unusually large number of times over months, and in some cases even over years, and the change of the task times analyzed.
There were 13 participants so far. Among them three are still continuing. As of March 15, 2000, a Participant PA completed 60,463 trials in 1,395 daily sessions on almost consecutive days (excepting for a 6-month break). Participants PE1 and PE2 completed 32,246 and 34,096 trials in 836 and 824 daily sessions, respectively, also on almost consecutive days. In addition, an informal experiment with a pair of cat's cradle tasks was done with 7 participants for about 100 daily sessions each. The findings include :
1. Plotting these data on a log0log scale reveals that, after about 1,000 trials, the graphs regularly oscillate between a pair of upper and lower straight lines, or"envelopes."
2. The changes of the shapes that the histograms of the task times undergo are describable as the competitions amongs the peaks in these histograms, in which those corresponding to faster performance win in the end.
3. A run test to these data (including those with cat's cradle) tells that it is impossible to interpret them as genuine straight lines as predicted by the power law plus purely random noises.
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