Guillermo Campitelli

The study of memory is central to scientific understanding of expertise. Memory processes underpin skilled performance in complex tasks, whether choosing a move in a chess game, playing a musical instrument, or diagnosing a medical patient. Moreover, acquiring expertise changes memory structures. This chapter reviews major perspectives on expertise and used the umbrella term knowledge structure to refer to all the types of memory structures proposed in theories of memory based on expertise research, including chunks, templates, retrieval structures, and semantic knowledge. Those theories postulate that knowledge structures reside in the long-term memory store and accept the traditional dual models of the macrostructure of memory (i.e., models that postulate the existence of a short-term [or working] memory store and a long-term memory store). This chapter also presents a recent proposal in the field of expertise research that suggests knowledge structures constitute the macrostructure of memory, and it reviews brain imaging studies investigating the interrelation between memory and expertise. The effect of individual differences in traditional measures of working memory capacity on expertise is discussed. The chapter concludes with thoughts on productive directions for future research.

This chapter covers the major approaches to research on expertise. It also covers the behavioral approach. The chapter explains methodological and statistical issues and pitfalls in expertise research and discusses the role of various ability and non-ability factors in expertise. It covers processes underlying chess expertise, while James Staszewski analyzes expertise in Rubik's Cube solving. The chapter discusses the role of intelligence for developing professional expertise and summarizes findings from the largest-ever study of prodigies. It gives an update on the role of talent in drawing, and Rebecca Chamberlain presents evidence from her multifactorial study of drawing expertise. The chapter provides an overview of neuroimaging techniques, particularly as applied to expertise research. It covers neural underpinnings of expertise in three domains and identifies neural correlates of motor expertise in real-world domains such as surgery.

This chapter reviews the topic of cognitive processes in chess showing that pattern recognition is an essential cognitive process for chess playing. Pattern recognition is not only useful for recognizing positions and generating possible moves in the current position, but it is also an integral part of the search process. Instead of moving pieces in the actual chess board, chess players simulate their movement in the mind's eye, and they recursively apply pattern recognition over the positions held in the mind's eye. The seminal studies inspired many cognitive scientists to investigate cognitive processes in chess players, not only to understand chess expertise per se but also as a model to study the cognitive processes that underlie decision making in general. The chapter discusses three cognitive processes that were investigated in chess players: pattern recognition, search, and imagery.

Expert performance can defy belief. Consider that Timur Gareyev, in breaking the world record for “blindfold” chess, simultaneously played 48 opponents without being able to see their boards, losing only six games. Or consider that Alex Mullen, en route to winning the 2016 Memory World Championships, memorized a deck of cards in 21.5 seconds. Equally astonishing, in 2016, Feliks Zemdegs set the Rubik’s Cube speed-solving record with a time of 4.73 seconds.

Why are some people so much more successful than other people in music, sports, games, business, and other complex domains? This question is the subject of one of psychology's oldest debates. Over 20 years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that individual differences in performance in domains such as these largely reflect accumulated amount of “deliberate practice.” More controversially, making exceptions only for height and body size, Ericsson et al. explicitly rejected any direct role for innate factors (“talent”) in the attainment of expert performance. This view has since become the dominant theoretical account of expertise and has filtered into the popular imagination through books such as Malcolm Gladwell's (2008) Outliers. Nevertheless, as we discuss in this chapter, evidence from recent research converges on the conclusion that this view is not defensible. Recent meta-analyses have demonstrated that although deliberate practice accounts for a sizeable proportion of the variance in performance in complex domains, it consistently leaves an even larger proportion of the variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors. In light of this evidence, we offer a “new look” at expertise that takes into account a wide range of factors.

How the brain enables humans to reach an outstanding level of performance typical of expertise is of great interest to cognitive neuroscience, as demonstrated by the number and diversity of the articles in this Research Topic (RT). The RT presents a collection of 23 articles written by 80 authors on traditional expertise topics such as sport, board games, and music, but also on the expertise aspects of everyday skills, such as language and the perception of faces and objects. Just as the topics in the RT are diverse, so are the neuroimaging techniques employed and the article formats. Here we will briefly summarize the articles published in the RT.

The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of several chess prodigies. This poses a challenge to the main attempt to account for individual differences in high‐level performance: the deliberate practice framework. The main alternative to this approach is the view that intelligence plays an important role in chess expertise. However, studies have shown that intelligence may be important only in the first stages of the chess players‘ careers. In this chapter, we present the practice‐plasticity‐processes model, which incorporates neural plasticity and cognitive processes (domain‐specific pattern recognition and heuristics) as explanatory variables. A mathematical simulation shows that the model was able to capture the existence of prodigies and three out of four other effects encountered in the chess expertise literature. Further research should improve the model to account for all the effects. If this model receives empirical support in further research, it would provide a very parsimonious account of chess genius.

Research on the phenomenon of problem gambling could be characterised as the investigation of factors involved in the acquisition, development and maintenance of gambling behaviour. In this chapter, we aim at integrating the problem gambling research field with the psychology of expertise research field in two ways. First, we address the issue of acquisition of expertise in gambling using theories of expertise. Second, we introduce the concept of the illusion of expertise as one of the possible causes for the maintenance of problem gambling.