Learning in the Right Places

A learner's experience is in large measure determined by the situations it encounters in the problem space, and, for a challenging task, only a small fraction of that space can ever be visited. People's ability to learn to perform well on such tasks is therefore a clear indication that not all situations are equally relevant to learning. The primary contributions of this article are the notion of key nodes, situations particularly important to the development of expertise, the presentation of empirical evidence for their existence, and the design of a training method intended to capitalize on them. This article suggests why key nodes may be clustered in the search space and describes how a learner may arrive at a key node by chance, be drawn there by a choice the learner makes or be driven there by the actions of another agent. This article offers empirical evidence of substantial improvement in the quality of performance when a game-learning program is deliberately directed to clusters of key nodes, and considers several ways to do so. It also discusses the extension of these results to other domains and speculates on the significance of thee results for human learners.