Q.What is a skill? What are the stages through which skill learning develops?

A skill is defined as the ability to perform a complex task smoothly and efficiently — examples include car driving, airplane piloting, ship navigation, shorthand writing, and reading and writing themselves. Every skill is built up through practice and exercise, and a skill can be described as a chain of perceptual-motor responses, or a sequence of stimulus-response (S-R) associations linked into one smooth, extended performance, rather than a single isolated response learned in a single trial.

One of the most influential accounts of how skills develop was presented by Fitts, who described skill learning as passing through three qualitatively distinct phases: cognitive, associative, and autonomous. In the cognitive phase, the learner must understand and memorise the instructions for the task and grasp exactly how it is meant to be performed; every outside cue, instructional demand, and the outcome of each of their own responses must be actively held in conscious awareness — this is the effortful, deliberate stage of early learning, such as a beginner driver consciously thinking through clutch, gear, and mirror checks. In the associative phase, different sensory inputs become linked to their appropriate responses; with continued practice, errors decrease, performance improves, and less time is needed to perform the task, although the learner must still remain attentive to sensory input and stay concentrated throughout. In the autonomous phase, two important changes occur together: the attentional demands that were present in the associative phase decrease, and interference from outside distractions is reduced; skilled performance now attains automaticity, meaning it can be carr …