I’ll bet it’s been a while since the alphabet blew your mind.
If you’ve learned anything at any time in the past four decades, you’ve probably been exposed to the Four Stages of Competence model for skill acquisition. Originally created by Noel Burch in the 1970s, it was first described as the “Four Stages for Learning Any New Skill.” The model was a pyramid structure progressing upward through four phases:
- 1 - Unconscious Incompetence
- 2 - Conscious Incompetence
- 3 - Conscious Competence
- 4 - Unconscious Competence
When you’re learning something like how to ride a bicycle or play the ukulele, you start out completely incompetent (“Unconscious Incompetence”) and aren’t even sure about the parameters of the skill. What do you need to learn? What would success look like? How do you even begin the learning process?
As you get a rough understanding of the domain, you still suck at the skill, but at least you’re starting to know which way is up. This is Conscious Incompetence. You’re terrible, but you’re building up your skills — with heavy concentration, though not much proficiency to show for it.
With enough practice, you work your way into Conscious Competence. You can perform the task, but it requires your attention. You don’t want distractions; this is the kind of task you might perform with your tongue pressed between your lips and your muscles tense for no good reason.
Finally, with enough practice and effort, you reach Unconscious Competence — the promised land in which you can perform the task well without actively thinking about it. Your attention can be elsewhere. Walking, chewing gum, dialing your phone all at once — no problem. You have Unconscious Mastery over each of these skills.
Burch’s paradigm seems pretty all-inclusive. It’s typically drawn as a pyramid, but it also works as a nice, tight 2x2 matrix — two variables, each with two states — that doesn’t appear to allow logical room for any other varieties of skill.
After all — what wouldn’t fit into one of those four categories?
But from what I can tell, John Hopkins University may have just broken the paradigm.
And if you agree that they did so, then you’ll also agree that they did it with a devilishly simple refutation — no fMRIs, no fancy math, no computer models…
They did it with just a simple example which you’ve already seen about 30 times in this very article. 😮
“If you don’t know me by now…”
In 1972, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes released “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” a mournful love song that hit number three in the US Pop charts on its debut and has since been covered by numerous other musicians.
The gist of the song is clear in its title: After enough exposure and ability to scrutinize something, if you still haven’t figured it out, then it’s probably never, ever going to happen.
Despite my cat’s fascination with the red dot from a laser pointer, there’s never going to be a burst of insight where the cat “gets it” and realizes she’s being duped by the small gadget in my hand across the room. She’s forever trapped at Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence.
The cat example fits Burch’s learning model just fine. Because the laser pointer is my tool, not the cat’s. For what it’s worth, I’ve gained Unconscious Competence of the laser pointer. (Please hold your applause until the end.)
But what if there was a tool I use daily — that I use flawlessly—that I couldn’t even identify? And it’s a tool I’ve been trained to use, a human artifact. This isn’t a trick with a cheat-answer like “my lungs” or “sense of balance” or some instinctive skill humans are genetically wired to easily master.
This is a skill in the bicycles-and-ukuleles category.
And it straddles a weird nether region between the first and the fourth layers in Burch’s pyramid: Unconscious Competence overlaid on a total vacancy that anything has been learned at all.
And all this despite having been taught this skill explicitly, and using it daily — near-constantly — ever since.
Gee whiz, can you guess?
The skill that I’m talking about is the use of a tool — in fact, not a physical tool but a symbol.
I’m not going to tell you which symbol just yet. It will be more fun if you take a little test to see for yourself. It’ll only take a moment.
It’s a quiz with one question, self-graded: Click here.
So, did you get it right?
If you read even a little, you see hundreds (probably thousands) of lower-case gs every single day. And in most printed material, which uses common fonts like Calibri and Times New Roman, the version you see is the “looptail g.”
When we’re writing by hand (or reading sans-sarif fonts), we use the “opentail g,” which looks like a circle with a candy-cane hanging off the side.
What’s amazing is that — as recently reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance — despite the immeasurable number of repetitions we get using the looptail g, most of us don’t even have the semantic knowledge that it exists.
If asked to “draw me a g” — we’ll draw the opentail version.
And if asked “which lowercase letters have more than one written version?” we’ll stare blankly, thinking about trick answers involving Spanish accent marks or Greek characters only used in mathematics.
Of 38 adults asked by the Johns Hopkins researchers to “list letters with two lowercase print varieties,” only two of them named g. And only one of those two could write the looptail version correctly.
Kimberly Wong, the study’s first author, explains: “We’d say to them: ‘There are two forms of g. Can you write them?’ And people would just stare because they had no idea. And once you really nudged them, insisting, some would still say there is no second g.”
In a separate experiment, 25 people took the same test you just did above, trying to identify the correct looptail g among four similar versions. Only seven of the 25 got it right — a ratio that could have been expected if they’d been picking an answer at random.
The researchers attribute this finding to the fact that we don’t learn to write this style of g, and we rarely see it on its own. It’s almost always in the context of some full-fledged word — and that word in a sentence, the sentence in a paragraph… Etcetera, etcetera.
According to the study’s senior author Michael McCloskey, “What may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. Looptail g is something we’re never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well.”
I think McCloskey is giving us more credit here than we deserve. It’s not that we don’t know the looptail g “well.” We are ignoramuses about it. We can’t draw it. We can’t pick it out of a line-up. We don’t know it exists. And many people will strenuously argue that it doesn’t exist, even when told otherwise.
It would have been really fun to see videos of the “looptail g deniers” after its existence was revealed in all its stark obviousness.
Does this break the “Four Stages” model?
I’m not sure if the looptail g “discovery” breaks Burch’s model of skill acquisition in an important way.
But it does seem intriguing to find a skill that is so invisible to our conscious experience, but where we still have mastery. I don’t view the looptail g phenomenon as being at all the same as, say, the unconscious mastery of a bicycle. One could argue that bicycle riding is mostly “physical intuition” after we’ve gotten the hang of it, and the actual skills involved are hard to state explicitly…
But no cyclist would deny the existence of bicycles. And you could easily identify a bicycle among a collection of vehicles. Something very different is happening with the looptail g.
Can you think of other instances of “invisible expertise”?
Now that I’m aware of the looptail g enigma…I wonder if more oddities like this are all around us, hiding in plain sight?
PS: Here’s the original Johns Hopkins Press Release describing this study.
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