Junwoo Kim Doug Markant and Liz Przybylinski Extra Credit Assignment

06/25/12 Cognition

The Scientific Study of Expert Levels of Performance: general implications of optimal learning and creavitiy by K. Anders Ericsson I have always firmly believed that we were restricted by certain innate limitations predetermined at birth. With the advent of genetics in my education and repertoire of knowledge, I continually looked to confirm the belief that we are born with a certain amount of potential and that not everyone is as gifted as others. This was especially obvious in the realm of sports; take basketball as an example. It does not take a genius to observe that taller and larger players had a clear advantage over the shorter and smaller players. Also, how else could one explain the transition of basketball teams recruiting individuals well over the average height in the nation and the apparently drastic improvements and changes in strategy within the game that followed? It seemed as if taller players were gifted with skills that allowed them to dominate the court. However, according to Ericsson, a leading psychologist in the field of expert performance, it may not be as simple as it seems. Well, at least for things outside of sports. Ericsson and many other leading psychologists, including Gardner and Charness, claim that there is no firm evidence for the innate talent that we attribute to many experts. Instead, they argue that we tend to quickly label the incredible feats experts are able to perform as a kind of miracle that can only be explained by some notion of birthright. A classic example of this misconceived idea is illustrated with Isaac Newton. As a leading figure in science during his time, Newton was able to explain the motions of planets and objects with mathematical formulas, thereby rewriting the laws of physics as put forth by Aristotle and Descartes. His innovation and creativity led to the Scientific Revolution and his theories of classical mechanics still exist today and are taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country. This example may not make sense to those who are not literate in science but the point is that Newton is considered a genius by many. Like the Youtube video comically praising his accomplishments (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=danYFxGnFxQ), we often hold these sorts of accomplishments on a pedestal and attribute them to birthright (i.e. Newton was a prodigy, born a genius, an anomaly). However, what Ericsson shows us with his work is that Newton was not some god but merely an expert. But perhaps more importantly, his work implies that even we can become an expert; a memory champion, a professional chess player, an expert musician, a creative innovator. So, how do we define an expert? According to Ericsson, an expert is an individual who has mastered the specific set of techniques and skills within a field and who possesses a lot of knowledge within their area of expertise such that innovation and individual contribution is possible. The initial part of this definition should be self-explanatory but the last part is often missed and considered the most important. It is often argued that the highest level of achievement any expert can accomplish in his or her field is creative innovation that transcends current knowledge (Ericsson 94). This will be discussed in more detail later but now, we are interested in dispelling the misconception that a genius is some omniscient anomaly.

Many people would be surprised if they were told the best violinist in this world is unable to reproduce a technique or a skill another expert violinist is able to do. The reasoning is that people expect a genius, a prodigy, or an expert to be able to do everything and anything related to their field of expertise. However, current research reveals that this is not the case and experts often excel tremendously in specific skills that differentiate them from the rest of the competition but not in general knowledge and expertise. What does this mean? A musician who can play songs on one string is really good at doing exactly that but not that much better at other aspects of playing the violin than any other expert. Perhaps a more familiar example for readers my age would be the Tetris Battle craze on Facebook. Not to sound arrogant, I am very good at playing using T-Spins. People are often amazed and fascinated by my ability to set them up and execute the strategy continuously so much so that they label me as a better Tetris player than themselves. However, I am unable to attain similar results using a different strategy such as the combo spamming strategy. Thus, I am good at that specific aspect of the game, but not anything else. But how did I achieve such a result? Ericsson coined the term as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice refers to the activities individuals engage in to improve their performance. It is distinct from practice that consists of constant drilling over a short period of time to achieve a quick improvement and automatization of performance. In deliberate practice, performance is not automatized and consistently improves performance over a long period of time often in the span of years although with diminishing returns. Ericsson, then, attributed expert and elite performance to deliberate practice and experience, which often comes before the former. In order to investigate this, he studied musicians under standardized laboratory conditions by identifying tasks in the domain of expertise that captured the essence of expert performance (Ericsson 81). In this experiment, Ericsson recruited three groups of musicians at the Music Academy of West Berlin. The groups were divided as follows: best violinists, good violinists, and music teachers. The best violinists consisted of only the best within a class considered by their instructors as the ones with the greatest potential for careers as international soloists. The good violinists were from the same class but were not as highly esteemed as the best violinists. And the music teachers were from a different program within the school with lower admission criteria. Thus, through a combination of interviews, questionnaires, and diary studies, biographical data was collected and analyzed. In ratings of relevance, effort, and pleasure of music related activities, there were no significant differences between these three groups. However, there was a significant difference in reported amounts of time practicing alone between the groups. The two better groups averaged over 24 hours a week while the music teachers averaged only about 9 hours a week. Also, the amount of accumulated practice between the groups differed greatly. The best violinists, before starting at the music academy, accumulated over 7400 hours of practice, the good violinists over 5300 hours of practice, and music teachers over 3400 hours of practice. Interestingly, the estimated accumulated practice of the best violinists was very similar to middle aged professional violinists. Thus, Ericsson was able to claim that deliberate practice and not merely experience is responsible for expert acquisition. In a second experiment with chess players, which will not be discussed in details here for brevity, Ericsson was able to differentiate deliberate practice from drilling. He did this by showing that professional chess players did not engage in automatized behavior. When faced with a chess setup that they never encountered, they were asked to say aloud their thought process and were able to

provide explanations as they analyzed the board. Hence, this demonstrated that expert performance was indeed not an automatized behavior and that the subjects retained executive control. However, the most critical implication of this study is that creativity can arise from expertise. By saying aloud their thought processes when encountered with an unfamiliar board, the experts were able to analyze, evaluate, and reason many different possible strategies indicating that they possessed more refined internal mental representations than an amateur. Expert chess players also demonstrated greater and more efficient recall of certain patterns than amateur chess players. This means that experts are able to more efficiently store and manipulate larger amounts of information and come up with new, genuine, innovative solutions to problems more easily than amateurs. Creativity, then, can be defined as the innovation of older and current knowledge to synthesize new knowledge or perhaps reinvent it altogether. Ericsson often refers to this highest level of achievement as eminence in his work and distinguishes it from expertise. He claims that eminence, the ability to make innovative contributions within a domain, requires expertise. This suggests that it is not simply the amount of experience or amount of deliberate practice that results in creativity. So, my assertion before about Newton being merely an expert was incomplete. Newton was an expert in his domain but he achieved eminence, an exceedingly rare feat according to Simonton. This may seem confusing after reading so much about expert acquisition as a rebuttal to the traditional view of eminence as a birthright. How is this different from acknowledging prodigies and geniuses? Ericsson offers us a new framework that limits the role of innate characteristics that we tend to attribute these successes to general levels of activity and emotionality (i.e. motivation). Thus, my initial belief appears to be incorrect in this perspective. However, I find comfort in this new paradigm of elite performance because it implies that I may get there someday even if I dont consider myself a genius, perhaps in ten years.