Procedural memories can also be categorized as implicit or unconscious memories. These memories exist without us being able to recall exactly when or how we learned them and they are often very difficult to explain verbally. Some examples of procedural memories are riding a bike, an experienced driver navigating a familiar route in a car or reading a block of text and inferring meaning from it. While each of us may have some episodic memories of learning these skills, it is usually difficult to pinpoint where, or when, or even how, mastery occurred. I can recall anecdotal accounts of learning to drive. In one memory, my father took me to an abandoned office park and he flooded a section of the road. He then instructed me to approach the pooled water at 40 mph and to slam on my brakes. He believed this experience would teach me about driving during inclement weather conditions and how a car handles differently in said conditions. While I vividly remember this experience on my road to driving mastery, I cannot tell you the point in time where the process became largely automatized. While we don’t have a lot of information about how most procedural memories are specifically acquired, we do know quite a bit about how most people acquire the skill of reading. The knowledge we have about how we learn to read is due, in part, to the overarching importance of the task to the rest of our lives.
Once reading has become an unconscious process, we can use our skill to learn other skills and facts. However, to get to that point, we must first learn to read. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, a Harvard professor, named Jeanne Chall, was working to unravel the processes through which we learn to read. (Honan, 1999) She described 5 stages (sometimes six stages) of the typical steps involved in learning to read. The first stage (referred to as “Stage 0”), which is also the longest stage, begins at birth and lasts until around age 6. (Robert Siegler, 2011) During this preliminary stage, children learn phonemic awareness, which is the knowledge of the sounds that exist within words.
The mastery of the concept of the individual building blocks of the sounds that combine to form words that have meaning, advances in the second stage (“Stage 1”) of learning to read. Stage 1 lasts for a couple of years, usually from around 1st grade, or age 6, until 2nd grade or age 7. At this time, children use their phonemic awareness and they apply it in a new way to start transforming letters into sounds and eventually combining those sounds into words. This skill set, sometimes called “sounding out”, is more correctly called “phonological recoding skills.” (Robert Siegler, 2011) Around this same time, children also begin using visually based retrieval to comprehend words. In visually based retrieval, the visual input is not recoded as an auditory stimulus. Instead, meaning is inferred directly from the visual coding of the word. (Robert Siegler, 2011) In stage 2, between 2nd and 3rd grade, children begin to be able to read basic words, fluently.
In Stage 3, from around 4th grade through 8th grade, children make the shift from learning to read, to reading to learn. (Chall, 1983) They are able to learn new ideas and concepts from the written word. The previous stages that taught mechanics and mastery are put into action in Stage 3. These concepts continue to blossom through the rest of this fourth stage and into the next. Stage 4, from 8th grade through 12th grade, allows even more advanced concepts to be introduced through the written word. Children in this stage are able to comprehend broader topics, with more complex information and syntax.
If we look very closely at the process through which reading is mastered, there are some concepts that can very easily be applied to other procedural memory formations. Specifically, we see from Stage 0-2 there is inference to a procedure known as “rehearsal.” Rehearsal is a technique that can help information stay in the working memory. It is also a technique that, with a little tweaking, can help transfer information from the working memory to the long term memory. This process of getting information, through rehearsal, into the long term memory requires not just thinking about a piece of information and repeating it, but also the formation of mental bridges that link the new information to be stored with older, already stored information. This is called “elaborative rehearsal.” (Goldstein, 2011)
While I cannot recall much about learning to drive, I perform this task daily. I clearly learned the rules that govern traffic, as well as the mechanics of moving my body in a way that appropriately controls the vehicle. It is likely that I began learning to drive when I was a small child. I learned that cars drive on roads, that traffic lights have meaning, that seatbelts have purpose, and so on. I used these basic understandings as building blocks that combined to form new connections such as the more complex naming and numbering systems of roads and the proper use of a turn signal and gear shift. By the time I first sat behind the steering wheel of the car, I already had a very well developed understanding of the principles of driving. Now, many years after my father flooded a parking lot, I face the looming knowledge that I will soon need to teach the same skills to my oldest child. However, I know now that I have been teaching her to drive for as long as I have been strapping her into the car seat.
References
Chall, J. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Chapter 7: Long Term Memory: Encoding and Retrieval. In E. B. Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (pp. 173-175). Belmont, Ca: Wadsworth.
Honan, W. (1999, Decemeber 12). Jeanne Chall: Educator and Expert in Early Reading. New York Times.
Robert Siegler, J. D. (2011). Acquisition of Academic Skills: Reading, Writing and Mathematics. In J. D. Robert Siegler, How Children Develop (pp. 323-329). New York: Worth Publishers.