K. Anders Ericsson

Long-Term Working Memory.

To account for the large demands on working memory during text comprehension and expert performance, the traditional models of working memory involving temporary storage must be extended to include working memory based on storage in long-term memory. In the proposed theoretical framework cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept directly accessible by means of retrieval cues in short-term memory, as proposed by skilled memory theory. These theoretical claims are supported by a review of evidence on memory in text comprehension and expert performance in such domains as mental calculation, medical diagnosis, and chess.

Expert Performance Its Structure and Acquisition

Counter to the common belief that expert performance reflects innate abilities and capacities, recent research in different domains of expertise has shown that expert performance is predominantly mediated by acquired complex skills and physiological adaptations. For elite performers, supervised practice starts at very young ages and is maintained at high daily levels for more than a decade. The effects of extended deliberate practice are more far-reaching than is commonly believed. Performers can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits on working memory capacity and sequential processing. Deliberate practice can also lead to anatomical changes resulting from adaptations to intense physical activity. The study of expert performance has important implications for our understanding of the structure and limits of human adaptation and optimal learning.

Deliberate Practice and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Expert Performance in Medicine and Related Domains

The factors that cause large individual differences in professional achievement are only partially understood. Nobody becomes an outstanding professional without experience, but extensive experience does not invariably lead people to become experts. When individuals are first introduced to a professional domain after completing their education, they are often overwhelmed and rely on help from others to accomplish their responsibilities. After months or years of experience, they attain an acceptable level of proficiency and are able to work independently. Although everyone in a given domain tends to improve with experience initially, some develop faster than others and continue to improve during ensuing years. These individuals are eventually recognized as experts and masters. In contrast, most professionals reach a stable, average level of performance within a relatively short time frame and maintain this mediocre status for the rest of their careers. The nature of the individual differences that cause the large variability in attained performance is still debated. The most common explanation is that achievement in a given domain is limited by innate factors that cannot be changed through experience and training; hence, limits of attainable performance are determined by one’s basic endowments, such as abilities, mental capacities, and innate talents. Educators with this widely held view of professional development have focused on identifying and selecting students who possess the necessary innate talents that would allow them to reach expert levels with adequate experience. Therefore, the best schools and professional organizations nearly always rely on extensive testing and interviews to find the most talented applicants. This general view also explains age-related declines in professional achievement in terms of the inevitable reductions in general abilities and capacities believed to result from aging. In this article, I propose an alternative framework to account for individual differences in attained professional development, as well as many aspects of age-related decline. This framework is based on the assumption that acquisition of expert performance requires engagement in deliberate practice and that continued deliberate practice is necessary for maintenance of many types of professional performance. In order to contrast this alternative framework with the traditional view, I first describe the account based on innate talent. I then provide a brief review of the evidence on deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance in several performance domains, including music, chess, and sports. Finally, I review evidence from the acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and examine the role of deliberate practice in this domain.

Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview

Traditionally, professional expertise has been judged by length of experience, reputation, and perceived mastery of knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, recent research demonstrates only a weak relationship between these indicators of expertise and actual, observed performance. In fact, observed performance does not necessarily correlate with greater professional experience. Expert performance can, however, be traced to active engagement in deliberate practice (DP), where training (often designed and arranged by their teachers and coaches) is focused on improving particular tasks. DP also involves the provision of immediate feedback, time for problem-solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior. In this article, we draw upon the principles of DP established in other domains, such as chess, music, typing, and sports to provide insight into developing expert performance in medicine.

Skill and Working Memory

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the important role of retrieval structures as working memory states. The working memory has at least the following components: (1) short-term memory, which provides direct and virtually immediate access to very recent or attended knowledge states; (2) intermediate-term memory, the task-specific retrieval structure in long-term memory, which provides direct and relatively fast access to knowledge states; and (3) context, which contains structures for controlling the flow of processing within the current task and provides relatively fast and direct access to knowledge structures relevant to the current task and context. The auditory and visual–spatial buffers are important components of working memory.

Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee

The expert performance framework distinguishes between deliberate practice and less effective practice activities. The current longitudinal study is the first to use this framework to understand how children improve in an academic skill. Specifically, the authors examined the effectiveness and subjective experience of three preparation activities widely recommended to improve spelling skill. Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. Rated as the most effortful and least enjoyable type of preparation activity, deliberate practice was increasingly favored over being quizzed as spellers accumulated competition experience. Deliberate practice mediated the prediction of final performance by the personality trait of grit, suggesting that perseverance and passion for long-term goals enable spellers to persist with practice activities that are less intrinsically rewarding—but more effective—than other types of preparation.

An expert-performance perspective of research on medical expertise: the study of clinical performance

Context  Three decades ago Elstein et al. published their classic book on medical expertise, in which they described their failure to identify superior performance by peer‐nominated diagnosticians using high‐ and low‐fidelity simulations of the everyday practice of doctors.

Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance: an account based on the expert performance framework

Giftedness researchers have long debated whether there is empirical evidence to support a distinction between giftedness and attained level of achievement. In this paper we propose a general theoretical framework that establishes scientific criteria for acceptable evidence of superior reproducible performance, which any theory of exceptional performance must explain. We review evidence for superior reproducible performance, generally emerging only after extended periods of deliberate practice that result in subsequent physiological adaptations and complex cognitive mechanisms. We also apply this framework to examine proposed evidence for innate talents. With the exception of fixed genetic factors determining body size and height, we were unable to find evidence for innate constraints to the attainment of elite achievement for healthy individuals.

Models of Working Memory: Long-Term Working Memory as an Alternative to Capacity Models of Working Memory in Everyday Skilled Performance

FIVE CENTRAL FEATURES OF THE THEORY (1) We define working memory in terms of its function, namely maintaining efficient selective access to information that is needed to complete a given task. This function can be achieved in everyday skilled performance by a wide range of different mechanisms. In contrast, traditional short-term working memory employs only a small subset of those alternatives. (2) The amount of information that can be maintained in accessible form in working memory for a specific task is not limited by a fixed capacity. As part of the extended skill acquisition necessary to attain very high levels of performance, experts acquire knowledge and skills to rapidly encode information in long-term memory such that the information can be efficiently accessed with retrieval cues (longterm working memory or LT-WM) whenever it is later needed to complete the task. Similar acquired mechanisms mediate the large working memory in skilled everyday performance. (3) LT-WM is mediated by associative recall from long-term memory, and to function reliably it provides different types of mechanisms for overcoming the problems of interference resulting from repeated associations to related retrieval cues. (4) LT-WM reflects a complex skill acquired to meet the particular demands of future accessibility for information with tasks within a particular domain of expertise. Domain-relevant skills, knowledge, and procedures for the task are so tightly integrated into the skills for encoding of information that the traditional assumption of a strict separation between memory, knowledge, and procedures is not valid for skilled performance. […]

Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior Performance of Experts in the Laboratory Toward a Science of Expert and Exceptional Performance

Expertise researchers have traditionally shied away from studying the highest levels of achievement in favor of studying basic cognitive processes, such as memory and categorization. In this article, we present a different approach that is focused on capturing superior (expert) performance on representative tasks that reveal the essential characteristics of expertise in a given domain. In domains where expert performance is measurable, acquisition is gradual and the highest levels are only attained after 10 years of intense preparation—even for the most “talented.” Analyses of reproducibly superior performance show that it is mediated by physiological adaptations and cognitive skills acquired as a result of the cumulative effects of special practice activities (deliberate practice). It appears that the genes necessary to attain such adaptations and expert skills can be activated in healthy children—the only clear exceptions to date being genes that control body size and height. Our knowledge of how experts acquire their superior skills provides insights into the potential for human adaptation and skill acquisition and has important implications for theories of the structure of general and expert cognition, as well as for training interventions in applied psychology and education.