What Is Automaticity?

Automaticity is the ability to perform a task, activity, or behavior without thinking about each step in the process. It tends to result from repetition, practice, and learning. Once children achieve a certain level of automaticity, they have mastered an activity or skill.

After sufficient repetition and practice, automaticity is achieved. At this point, the task can be done while the mind is occupied with other things. For example, a child who has automatized the walking skill can converse about feathered dinosaurs while toddling along.

Take an infant learning to hold her bottle as an example. At first, her little hands find their way to the bottle and help her caregiver hold it. With more repetition and practice, she can hold it and drain the bottle–but the task takes a lot of focus. After still more repetition and practice, she’s holding the bottle with one hand, shaking a rattle with the other while watching nearby kids play–the skill has achieved automaticity.

Repetition plays a big part in achieving automaticity–children tend to do things over and over and over and over and over again–and then they do them some more.

At point A in the above illustration, the skill or task requires a lot of effort and focus. At point B, after some repetition and practice, it becomes easier–although some concentration is still required. By point C, the activity has become automatic and can be performed without thinking or conscious effort.

With repetition and practice, children achieve automaticity with all kinds of activities–pouring, painting, swinging on their own, walking, writing, and maybe even surfing.

One big way adults can better support children through this process is to offer up play environments where children can practice skills. For example, it’s hard to master pouring when you never have time or opportunity to pour.

Another way to support this process is to accept the inevitable awkwardness. Until automaticity is achieved, children’s efforts can be clumsy, bumbling, slow, graceless, unpolished, and messy. Learning to pour comes with spills, and learning to master a paintbrush comes with messes. It’s all part of the process.

Contribute content to Playvolution HQ
Brought to you by Explorations Early Learning

Browse Trainings