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)
what is pattern learning and memory
Experts display enhanced memory for information in their domains of expertise. (also better to recognize patterns)
chess examples with experts
DE GROOT (1965, 1966)
-Chess masters very similar to non-chess masters (aside from chess ability); you would expect chess people to be geniuses but they are really just good at chess
-Chess has been used to study reasoning and intelligence
CHASE AND SIMON (1973)
-Compared novice, Class A, and master chess players
-Masters’ memory for board positions (pieces on the board) better than novice:for actual game positions, not random configurations
-People who were masters and novices remembered the same amount of random configurations, but masters knew more actual game positions
-Masters can “chunk” more info than novices
brain activation study for experts
Bialic et al (2011), reorganization of fusiform area
-Shown real or random positions, asked if king was in check or if knights in both colors were on the board
-Interested in activity in fusiform area of the brain (brain area active when people are experts)
Found:
-Experts always have higher activity
-In particular, experts have higher activity for actual chess positions
implications of AI and human intelligence with chess
Computers achieve chess expertise differently than humans.
-Computers: search all possibilities
-Humans: pattern recognition
-Computers eventually won
-Can intelligence be achieved in different ways?
long term memory and expertise
the advantage shown by experts is not just a working memory advantage, it also extends to long-term memory.
-Experts remember more patterns as well as larger patterns.
digit span experiment with long term memory and expertise
Chase and Ericsson (1982) digit span experiment
-Development of retrieval structures allows for superior recall for past patterns and is part of what underlies the development of expertise in other domains.
-Took a college student and showed him long strings of numbers, going up to potentially 80 digits; over the course of a lot of practice, they trained him to memorize 80 digits; he was able to look at 80 digits and then name them all back
-The growth in S.F.’s memory span with practice. Notice how the number of digits that he can recall increases gradually but steadily with the number of practice sessions.
-The kid was a long distance runner, he was chunking it every couple digits because he knew so much about race times he was converting them to race times, make it meaningful and he was able to remember in those chunks
what is deliberate practice
-Motivated to learn (not perform), get feedback, carefully monitor
-Much deliberate practice is necessary to develop expertise and drives neural growth. (studies where this has been tracked overtime and looked at brain changes in people who developed expertise)
study with violinists and taxi drivers about deliberate practice
Elbert et al. (1995): Violinist fingering technique and right cortical development
-Scanning brains of people learning to play violin, because you are doing the fingering with the left hand your right side of the brain will be controlling it in the back of the frontal lobe
-Studied brains of novices vs. experts, found that there was more development in the finger part of the motor cortex that controlled left fingers rather than right fingers
Maguire et al. (2003): London taxi drivers who could navigate expertly had increased gray matter in hippocampal region
-Expert taxi drivers had dense hippocampal regions compared to new drivers, concluded that when you drive taxis for a long time in London (done before GPS)
explain if transfer of skill actually occurs
-Expertise can often be quite narrow.
-There is often failure to transfer skills to similar domains
explain street vendor children study showing transfer of skill
-Would walk up to kids and give orders and the kids were able to determine how much things cost immediately in their heads, also able to calculate change very quickly
-Gave the kids math problems and the kids could not solve the math problems when they had to sit and look at a piece of paper
what are the results of doctrine of formal discipline
the DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE (Angell et al., 1908), is the idea that if you train your brain to do certain things and you will develop skills that will be widely applicable
-Studying esoteric subjects disciplines the mind
-Transfer is broad and take place at general level across disciplines
Led to a market for cognitive training programs (and, strangely, violent video games)
-Initial research supported a positive effect of both
-More recent research questions the validity of these claims due to methodological problems
what is the theory of identical elements
Thorndike (1906): mind is not a general thing, it’s a set of specific things
Transfer from one skill to another only if the skills are similar
-Ex. Calculus can be applied to real life things, e.g. if you are an engineer or a mechanic you can easily apply these things to finance because you are doing the same thing just with a different subject matter
-Thorndike’s formulation was overly narrow
-You can transfer across surface elements if underlying logic of task is the same
-Analogical reasoning
