David M. Callahan, Ph.D.
Providing Psychological Services to
Cape Cod and Southeastern Massachusetts
Training to Automaticity
One of the challenges in establishing comfortable habits and useable skills for individuals is the ability to call on those skills or abilities without requiring substantial effort or forethought. Many skills are learned naturally to that extent, such that they are performed with little thought, essentially being automatic in their responses. There are circumstances in which such “automaticity” proves more challenging to acquire for many individuals, as specific neurological vulnerabilities can make such learner harder to attain. For example, individuals with mathematical learning disabilities have tremendous difficulty learning basic math facts, as they are challenged to integrate and retain that material. Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders will have difficulty learning social skills, in part due to having difficulty understanding when specific behaviors should be utilized. Many children with attentional disorders struggle tremendously to learn daily routines, as their distractibility makes it challenging for them to create a template on which they can draw when asked to perform a specific task. In each of these situations, many tasks are approached each time as if they were essentially the first time, with little carryover and learning occurring.
One of the solutions to working around these difficulties is to train tasks to the point of automaticity. As stated above, automaticity essentially means that a task can be performed with virtually no thought, much as most adults commute to work with little awareness of their behavior unless something unusual occurs. For persons with neurological compromises, this training often takes far more trials than for the typical individual, and must be done very concretely. The general rules of thumb for such training for persons with areas of vulnerability is that the amount of material trained should be simplified, and that the number of repetitions required to learn the material is likely to be excessive. Thus, training a very small number of skills or routines while using excessive repetitions to insure that the material is fully acquired is encouraged.
By way of example, many youngsters struggle to learn their multiplication facts. For individuals for whom this proves challenging, simplifying that process by training a very small number, perhaps as few as four to six, multiplication facts repeatedly is encouraged. Reviewing these several times per day in brief bursts of activity is likely to be more effective than more concentrated training. Continuing that training until the point that the child has fully acquired the material, essentially responding without any time delay and perhaps even with some annoyance, is urged. Once a fact has been fully acquired, switching that with an alternative fact or facts is encouraged, followed by some sporadic review of the previously acquired fact. Often training too much at once results in no acquisition. Thus, while each child will differ in how much they can integrate, tailoring that approach to a child’s capability is more likely to be effective than a more broad-based approach.
Similarly, daily routines can often be taught in very molecular ways. Simplifying that process by teaching one or two steps initially, and then subsequently adding to that, is often most effective. Many children have difficulty understanding the “big picture” of tasks. Thus, breaking them into sequences that are repeated multiple times can be necessary, but also effective.
Many children struggle to learn language material due to cognitive limitations, attentional issues or other factors impeding them. One useful trick is to convert the material into music. Many years ago I worked with individuals with moderate to severe mental retardation (intellectual disability in current terminology) in a group home. One of the tasks required of us was to teach each resident his or her phone number. This proved very challenging for some individuals. However, once we converted the phone number into the song, the residents tended to pick it up rather quickly. Learning through music can be helpful in “connecting the dots” for individuals who have difficulty memorizing more rote material.
The major challenge in this type of training is to have sufficient patience to allow the person to learn at his or her own pace. It is often necessary to simplify the process for persons with some form of vulnerability or compromise. With that type of simplification, however, skills can be acquired and information retained at a level that is lifelong. Thus, while there is substantial effort involved in the initial acquisition, the amount of effort it saves makes that worth the energy expended to engage in the training.
