Expertise

Psychology 247 Cognitive Psychology Expertise Erwin Segal
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Problem Solving and the role of Expertise:

Early 20th Century Gestalt Psychologists viewed problem solving as fundamentally a structural organization problem. Poor problem solvers were usually those who had been misled into not using their natural organization skills.
Cognitive Psychologists historically viewed problem solving as learning a set of general purpose algorithms which could be selectively applied to the problem at hand. Good problem solving was primarily a function of high intelligence. Currently many cognitive psychologists' algorithms are based on Production Systems and problem solvers must be able to differentiate among many different conditions for context sensitive operations.
Some culturally oriented cognitive scientists view good problem solving as primarily a function of learning how to function in the relevant situations. This implies learning how to perceive relevant similarities and differences; developing appropriate context relevant memories, skills, and schemata; and learning appropriate operations. Good problem solving is strongly context dependent and people often are good problem solvers in some areas and not in others. According to this perspective almost everything that we do well is to a great extent based on developing expertise. We all become experts in some things and remain novices in others.

Skilled performance: typing, riding a bicycle, diving a stick-shift car, playing baseball, playing a violin or other musical instrument, singing, walking, speaking in public, telling jokes, shooting free throws, playing chess, playing bridge, playing poker, walking, speaking English, reading English narrative, listening to heart murmurs, writing essays, solving statistics problems, designing experiments, writing computer programs in Lisp, taking multiple choice tests

What is expertise? Two views:

Anders Ericsson: Expertise is 'relatively stable outstanding performance.' Someone called exceptional, superior, gifted, talented, specialist, expert, etc. Expertise is limited to the few. One can evaluate the underlying causes of expertise Don Norman introduced the notion that an someone requires 10,000 hours of experience and practice for reasonably complex domains to have the possibility of being an expert.

As suggested by Anderson, there is a power law for learning. Those who work at a domain of expertise with appropriate "Deliberate practice" longer and harder are those who are most likely to become "world-class" experts.

Erwin Segal and Micki Chi (I think): We are all experts in many different activities. Development of expertise has the same kind of quality as cognitive development is children.
Hypothesis: The development of expertise in everyone parallels the development of cognition in children.
Piaget's theory of cognitive development is that humans use cognition as a primary instrument in adapting to their environment. The adaptation process goes through several stages of development. The later ones dependent upon the earlier ones to occur. He identified a sequence of four global stages.

Sensory-motor stage (0-2 years) coordinate motor and sensory activities, begin to identify the parameters of what an object is.
Preoperational stage (2-7 years) Concreteness--operate on current experience, irreversibility of actions, egocentrism--one's own perspective is all there is, centering--current perspective is only one
Concrete operations (7-11 years) Conservation of substance, number, quantity; multiple perspectives can be considered
Formal operations (11 and up) Abstract out formal relations and conceptually manipulate them. Scientific reasoning and applied logic and mathematics.

It is important to realize that there are many everyday behaviors which have the properties of needing development of skill in order to perform skillfully: Walking, talking, reading English text, writing, riding a bicycle, driving a car, getting around campus, talking to friends, studying particular courses, taking notes, seeing mathematical relationships, understanding formal arguments, taking multiple choice tests, taking essay tests. Some activities are highly respected and rewarded in society for those whose performance is world class.

As people develop expertise, their skills and performance becomes structurally different than it was prior to that development. When one learns a new task she is automatically at an early stage of development. How early depends to a great extent on how many of the component skills have already been developed. Children are universal novices. They have not developed very many of the component skills needed for any domain. (Micki Chi.) Piaget's concept of Decalage is the order of the day; many of the skills needed are relatively domain specific. The topics in the topics of cognitive development are a selection of the topics that could be studied under the rubric of expertise. Following Vygotsky, people learn to perceive and think in the domains that they come into direct interaction with. Some skills are fairly general in that they underlie many other skills. Those are the ones that children tend to learn first.

Becoming a real expert: World class performance on recognizable skills with large individual differences require many hours of dedicated practice. Having behavior scaffolded by an expert often leads to much better performance: Karoli and gymnasts, Tennessee State track stars, Writers from U of Iowa workshops; Miss America candidates from Texas; Prodigies of all sorts.

Winton Marsalis's view on becoming an expert: commitment, listening, training, practice, confidence, independence.

Component skills and knowledges. Must borrow many of them, learn to apply them in the right places, and integrate them to the new task. Some knowledge and skill must be learned from scratch. Many skills need to be developed more highly. It is possible that all of the component skills can be decomposed into simple enough parts that they are known a priori; however, expertise still requires integrating and restructuring them into usable schemata.

What is the state of novice performance? Inchoate states, random trial and error, frustration, backward chaining, small units, surface form, separate nonintegrated components, bottom-up

Expert performance--focused, much forward chaining, top-down, coherent and integrated, abstract organization, large units, see relations and remember structured content, example of chess, proceduralization, integrated sequences, skillful, selective.