ABSTRACT
Individuals differ in many ways, including that some persons seem to acquire knowledge and skills more easily than others. This is evident in the improvements in performance time that occur as a result of practice, which follow a power function that has achieved the status of a law: The power law of practice (see Chapter 1). Some individuals show a steeper learning curve than others. Of theoretical note, close inspection of individual learning curves suggests that the “power law” may be a misnomer since, as you may recollect, Heathcote, Brown, and Mewhort (2000) provided evidence that learning curves for individuals are better fit by exponential functions. More recently, R. W. Howard (2014) reported that the improvement with practice across years for most chess players was fit best by a quadratic function, although the change for the best players conformed to a power function. Whether individual performance is better fit by a power, exponential, or quadratic function may seem like a minor detail. The general point, though,
In order to study the acquisition of complex skills, it is a good research strategy to have a theory of individual differences.
