System 1 and System 2 compete

3/17/2020 UPDATE: No! They don’t compete! They cooperate! They are “dissociable,” but they don’t compete. more t/k

I’m putting this here so I won’t lose it again:

Dual-system models of visual category learning posit the existence of an explicit, hypothesis-testing reflective system, as well as an implicit, procedural-based reflexive system. The reflective and reflexive learning systems are competitive and neurally dissociable.

Chandrasekaran, B. et al. “Dual-learning systems during speech category learning.” Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 2014 Apr 21, pp. 488-495.

re: 2 kinds of learning inside the brain

“Compete,” as I understand the term, means that when one system is on, the other is off. Each system can suppress the other.

That’s the meaning I glean from the various studies I’ve read.

“Dissociable” is an important term in cognitive science: it means that the two systems actually are two separate systems, not just two different aspects of the same fundamental process. The breakthrough study of “dual-system theory” in category learning was Smith et al’s study showing that when you experimentally disable one learning system, the other still functions.

The two systems can be “dissociated,” and are therefore two separate and dissociable systems, not one.

So I gather.

 

gasstationwithoutpumps on the two learning systems and grammar

Succinct and on the money:

Big chunks of grammar are rule-based learning, at least at the level of what distinguishes academic writing from casual conversation. The rules are articulated in grammar handbooks and can be consciously applied.

Grammar at the level of what sentences one can use in casual conversation is much more “information integration”, as it takes skilled linguists substantial effort to express the grammatical constraints in rules, and fairly complicated rule systems are needed for even crude approximations to grammaticality

That’s exactly right.

The principles Katharine and I teach in our curriculum can be learned–quickly learned–via rule-based learning:

• End focus: put the most important information in the sentence last 
• Known-new contract: start with information the reader already knows, proceed to new information he or she doesn’t know (or hasn’t heard you say yet)
• Cohesive topic chains: many if not most of your sentences in a paragraph should have the same or closely-related grammatical subject (I think the most effective percentage in a fairly long paragraph is around 75%)

And see:
The most important research on learning I’ve read