The analysis of practical skills (Croom Helm Biology in Medicine Series)

The origins of this book are in my first attempts to understand psychology as a post-war student in the Cambridge of the late 1940s. Sir Frederic Bartlett and his colleagues in the Psychology Department were talking and writing about the concept of the skill as the fundamental unit of behaviour. This made entire sense to me but not apparently to very many other people because the movement dwindled rapidly with the retirement of Sir Frederic in 1952. It got lost within performance studies which were essentially behaviouristic and stimulus-response in origin, a quite different style of thinking from the gestalt approach of skill psychology. This is not a simple dichotomy of course and skill psychology does go some way towards the analytic approach in accepting that a science needs to have a basic element, a unit from which the complexities of real behaviour can be constructed. into which it can be analysed and in terms of which it can be described and understood. The trick is to pick the right unit and I think that skills is an appropriate unit for human behaviour. Note the plural, although these units are elements they are not identical any more than the ninety-odd elements of the physical world are identical. The issue is sometimes clarified by considering the analogy with the attempt to describe a house. The simplest observable elements here are the brick. the piece of stone or the piece of wood. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-15 Laboratory Studies of Skill....Pages 16-43 The Forest Worker....Pages 44-54 The Farm Worker....Pages 55-84 The Metal Working Machine Tool Operator....Pages 85-111 The Sewing Machinist....Pages 112-126 The Dentist....Pages 127-150 The Passenger....Pages 151-168 The Train Driver....Pages 169-188 The Pilot....Pages 189-208 The Air-Traffic Controller....Pages 209-235 The Process Controller....Pages 236-263 The Tea Blender....Pages 264-277 The Information System Designer....Pages 278-291 The Architect as a Designer....Pages 292-310 Final Discussion....Pages 311-322 Back Matter....Pages 323-333