How do expert athletes defy the power law of practice, according to which improvement in a skill, although increasing rapidly initially, eventually plateaus?
On the standard models of skill learning (Anderson’s, 1982, Adaptive Control of Thought Theory and Fitts and Posner’s, 1967, three-stage model, for example), consciously attended to actions and highly proceduralized, or automatic, actions reside at opposite ends of a single continuum: the more conscious attention experts pay to their skill, the less automatic the skill proceeds, and the more automatic a skill is, the less attention experts pay to it. In contrast, our model of expertise places conscious attention and automaticity in an orthogonal relationship, with automaticity on one continuum (ranging from the highly controlled and non-automatic to highly automatic processing) and skill-focused conscious attention along a second, orthogonal continuum (ranging from situations in which experts are not consciously focusing on what they are doing to situations in which they are highly concentrated on their actions).
Conceiving of automated and consciously attended to processes in this manner helps us to explain a range of evidence suggesting that certain performance states are characterized by automaticity and attention operating in parallel while others are characterized by high levels of automaticity and low levels of conscious attention, and still others by high levels of conscious attention and low levels of automaticity.
From Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book, The Myth of ‘Just do it’: Thought and Effort in Expert Action:
In a paper entitled “The Way of the Wanton” (2008), David Velleman suggests that we achieve excellence only after we have moved beyond reflective agency. What he means by this is that although reflective agency—that is, thinking about and deliberating over our occurrent actions—is a stepping-stone to developing expertise, we perform at our best when we attain what he refers to as “self-forgetful spontaneity,” or “flow.” Expressing a version of the view I have been referring to as the just-do-it principle, he tells us that in highly-skilled actions, “the capacity to monitor…performance, to consider how it falls short of an ideal, and to correct it accordingly…is no longer exercised” (p. 188). Rather, after the requisite training, according to Velleman, “evaluative judgment is suspended” and experts act “without deliberate intention or effort” (p. 185). In previous chapters, I have argued for the importance of monitoring, evaluation and effort in expert action. In this chapter, I want to explore the role of self-awareness and discuss whether the pleasure of movement due in part to losing the self.
Science, Richard Feynman once said, is the belief in the ignorance of experts. If so—though I wouldn’t put it in quite those words—then perhaps my project should be dubbed scientific, for it is my belief that a wide range of experts who have written about expertise have been mistaken. In particular, I believe that various psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and other experts on high-level performance have erroneously concluded that expert action proceeds best when the mind is relatively less active, when action occurs automatically, and when bodily movements are effortless. These expertise-experts, I believe, are wrong…
On the philosophy of mind, Barbara Gail Montero, Wadsworth, Philosophical Topics Series, 2009, 141 pages.
With questions on such topics as “Can you know that other people see red the way you do?” “How is it that you are the same person throughout your life, even though the cells of your body are continually changing?” and “Is it possible to survive one’s bodily death?,” this book aims to inspire students to work out solutions to fundamental philosophical problems for themselves. Animated by the hope that with prior opinions about a topic students will have a much easier time delving into the literature in this field, ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND is filled with thought experiments as well as more concrete philosophical problems that arise in actual experiments in neuroscience and psychiatry. Not assuming any background in philosophy, the book is accessible to beginning students, but simultaneously, Montero’s unique approach will prove thought provoking for students with prior background in the subject too.
Barbara Gail Montero 