Literature Review on Skill Fade - Human Factors Integration ...

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Version No. 1/ 25 May 2007
1. Consistent Skills – usually psychomotor skills, require that they are trained to
automaticity so they can not be affected by unexpected stimuli
2. Complex Skills – usually cognitive skills, require the individual is trained to a
level where they have an excellent grasp of the underlying principles.
5.2 <strong>Literature</strong> <strong>Review</strong>
The Summers et al. paper includes McGuinness et al.’s (1995) tabulation of their findings
from a literature review on the topics relating to skill fade. McGuinness et al.’s tabulation
puts their review of the literature into broad categories proposed by Hurlock and
Montague (1982). These categories are Task Characteristics, Learning Factors, Post
Learning Activities, Job Conditions and Personal Characteristics. For completeness the
table is included below, however, it is not felt the information adds anything additional to
Arthur et al.’s summary of the literature (See Table 1).
Table 1. The Tabulation of Skill Retention <strong>Review</strong>
Training Factor Element Summary Findings
Task Characteristics
Psychomotor
• We lack a common metric for retention,
across different types of task.
Procedural
Cognitive
Social/Communication
Continuous; Discrete
• Differences in retention may be
attributable to task type (e.g.
procedural, cognitive) or how tasks are
organised.
• Analysis of a skill in terms of its
individual components is critical if the
objective is to identify which
components are relatively vulnerable to
decay or relatively stable over time.
• The majority of research has been for
psychomotor skills. There is very little
corresponding work on complex
cognitive skills.
Learning Factors
Learning, overlearning
and retention
• Long term retention of task competence
can be improved by increasing the level
of original learning.
• Criterion by which the level of
‘mastery’ is being tested needs to be
clearly defined to differentiate between
learning and overlearning, particularly
during the original learning phase.
• 50% overtraining would appear to be
the maximum amount required to
promote retention of task mastery.
• For maintaining optimal performance
for cognitive tasks, the interval between
training and performance should be no
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