Information Processing, Human Error and the Learning Process — Page 160, Lesson 256

I want to walk you through how a pilot moves through the different phases of learning and what happens when things go wrong. This is about the central decision maker — that's your conscious brain, the part of you that actively thinks about what you're doing. When you're flying, that central decision maker has a limited capacity, and we need to manage it carefully. Let's start with motor programmes. These are sequences of movements that your brain has stored so well that you can perform them without consciously thinking about each step. Motor programmes help to offload the central decision maker, and that increases a pilot's capacity. Think of it like this: if you had to consciously think about every single control input, you'd quickly run out of mental room for anything else. Now, consider a pilot in the cognitive phase of learning. That's the very first stage, where you're learning a new skill from scratch. In that phase, the central decision maker is working to maximum capacity — you have no surplus capacity left for anything else. Every action requires your full attention. Once you've practiced enough and achieved the automatic phase, everything changes. In the automatic phase, you can fly without conscious thought. That frees up the central decision maker for all the other vital activities that have to be looked after in the cockpit — things like navigation, communication, monitoring instruments, and managing emergencies. But here's the critical point: when the process of flying the aircraft becomes non-routine — for example, during an emergency or turbulence — the pilot must concentrate on flying again. In that situation, you may slip back into the associative stage. That's the middle phase, between cognitive and automatic, where you're still thinking about the skill but with more fluency than a beginner. You stay in that associative stage until conditions return to normal, and then you return to the automatic phase once again. The two most common causes of this temporary transition — slipping back from automatic to associative — are stress and lack of practice. Stress forces you to consciously attend to flying again, and lack of practice means the motor programme isn't as strong as it could be. Let me also clarify something about memory types, because the book gives a tennis example. There are three parts of long-term memory at work here. Semantic memory is for facts and knowledge — knowing the rules of tennis or how many sets are needed to win a match. Episodic memory is for personal experiences — remembering which side served last in the game you just played. Procedural memory, which is what motor programmes are stored in, is for knowing how to do something — like how to lob or volley. That's the memory system that lets you perform skills automatically. Now, motor programmes are normally held as non-declarative knowledge. That's a key term. Non-declarative knowledge means the possessor of the skill may not be able to explain the components of the skill. You can do it, but you can't easily describe how. This causes difficulty if you wish to pass the skill on to others — because you can't break it down into steps for them. Further, if you wish to modify the skill, you may find that thinking about your actions actually spoils the execution of the skill. In that case, you may have to go back almost to the beginning and relearn it from scratch.