Abstract
SKILL.—The nature of skill is discussed by Prof. T. H. Pear in the October issue of the Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. He begins by denning skill as an integration of well-adjusted performances, and distinguishes it from capacity and ability; it shows itself in the rapid adjustment to a changing environment and to unforeseen circumstances. Skills may be classified as (i) collections of imperfectly adapted responses, for example, much domestic work and the skill of most workers in semiskilled trades; (ii) perfectly adapted responses which do not exhibit personality, for example, movements on parade of the perfectly drilled soldier; (iii) responses resembling habits, but less specific and automatic; (iv) responses like those in (iii) but exhibiting in their totality a pattern characteristic of the individual; (v) creative skill. Prof. Pear then discusses the possibility of the transfer of training between motor abilities. Although experiment is very difficult in this field, yet there does seem to be experimental evidence in favour of the belief that manual habits acquired during training do not transfer to other activities. Prof. Pear suggests that the reason may be because in many low-grade industrial tasks only minimal attention is required: transfer might therefore not be expected between this almost ‘insulated’ entity and the rest of the personality. Although the belief in transfer is widespread and the problem is an old one, yet whenever attempts have been made to obtain experimental evidence, that evidence so far has been negative.
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Research Items. Nature 122, 1008–1011 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/1221008a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1221008a0