Chapter 9: Expertise Flashcards
what is expertise
As people become more proficient at a task, they seem to use less of their brains to perform that task.
what are the three stages of skill acquisition
-Cognitive stage
-Associative stage
-Autonomous stage
explain the cognitive stage of skill acquisition
Knowledge is in declarative form
-Not fluid, difficult to apply
Memorization of facts
Rehearse during task performance
-Talk themselves through it
Think about when you first learned how to do something complex
explain the associative stage of skill acquisition
-Errors are detected and eliminated.
-Connections for successful performance are strengthened.
-Declarative knowledge converts into procedural knowledge
explain the autonomous stage of skill acquisition
-The performance of the skill becomes more automated and rapid
-Performance requires fewer cognitive resources
how does performance of a cognitive skill improve and the cigar and geometry examples
Improves as a power function of practice
Cigar-making ability of a worker in a factory over 10 years (Crossman, 1959)
-Time to make the cigar gets better and better until you cannot make it any faster and you are constrained by the physical limitations of your body
Giving justifications for geometry-like proofs (Neves & Anderson, 1981)
-Time to solve the problems went down with time, people once again max out their ability
explain the reading of inverted text example for power law
-Investigated reading skills using several transformations, inverted texts
-After one year, participants’ improvement on retraining trials showed log-log (straight line negative, negative power function overall) relation between practice and performance, as had their original training.
-Left people alone for a year without training, and then started training them again; some loss that occurred, but they were still better at it than they originally were
stages of skill acquisition in the brain
-Investigated brain changes taking place during transformed text learning (previous study)
-Using fMRI brain-imaging, as learning progressed
-increased activity in basal ganglia
-decreased activation in hippocampus
-Revealed changes consistent with switch between cognitive and associative stages
what are the dimensions of the development of expertise
-Proceduralization
-Tactical learning
-Strategic learning
-Problem perception
-Pattern learning and memory
-Long-term memory and expertise
-The role of deliberate practice
what is proceduralization
Process by which declarative knowledge is converted into procedural knowledge as expertise is developed
-Development of expertise in geometry (Anderson, 1982)
-Gets faster
-Less rehearsal
-Less piecemeal reasoning
brain regions involved in solving math equations study
Meta-analysis of math problem-solving
-Anderson (2007)
-Evidence of activity in four brain regions while performing geometry tasks early on vs. after five days of practice
-Motor and ACC around the same early and later, parietal and prefrontal lobes used more early than later
what is tactical learning
-Learning of sequences of actions that help solve a problem
TACTIC
-Refers to a method that accomplishes a particular goal
-Initially we reason these things out
-Later, we can simply recall them
-Skill acquisition involves learning to recall solutions to problems that formerly had to be figured out (Logan, 1988).
study about memorizing letter differences in tactical learning
-Participants memorized answers to problems and were not going through the procedure of solving the problems by counting.
-Given a letter and a number, what letter comes X letters after the one you were given
-The number was called an addend
-Took people much longer to do the task depending on what the addend was, at first, the bigger the addend the longer it took people to do the task (time goes up as number of addends goes up)
-After 12 sessions, the number of addends did not matter, people were able to do it at an equally quick pace, people just remembered what the right answers were because of practice
what is strategic learning
-Organizing problem-solving for a specific class of problems
-Tactical learning involves learning new pieces of skill, whereas strategic learning is concerned with putting them together.
-Experts are able to choose more appropriate strategies
-Put things together better than novices
what is problem perception and example about physics problem
Growing expertise reflects the development of a set of richer perceptual features for encoding problems.
CATEGORIZING PHYSICS PROBLEMS
-Chi et al.
-Participants shifted their classification from reliance on simple features to reliance on more complex features as expertise increased
-Gave novices and experts different physics problems and asked people to categorize the problems that were similar; Novices use surface features to categorize problems (things that looked alike); experts use deep features to categorize problems (what the problems are actually asking about)
