A novice is defined in an English dictionary as a person who is new to a field or an activity. In sum, a beginner. This explanation seems to suggest that the progression towards becoming experienced in a given area is simply a matter of amassing the necessary knowledge which will eventually lead to a different status- one in which the skill or comprehension of the once novice will be judged to have improved to a level akin to that of someone in the same field who is already considered an expert.
The definition not only points to the notion of mere accumulation of knowledge, but also to the fact that expertise is something that, aside from being “inside the head”, is an attribute that can be estimated both externally and in objective terms. And while the measurable quality that is also part of what constitutes what we understand by talent shouldn’t be ignored, it encompasses other, more internal elements that have to do with specific skills acquired through training, a formalised aggregation of knowledge, and even individual differences. In contrast to experts, novices not only don’t know much about the formal particularities of a discipline, but they also seem to lack an understanding of the more internal organisation and the underlying structures of the subject at hand.
Expertise is a know-how that is not only based on knowledge and erudition, but more importantly on the ability to solve problems. An expert must be able to adeptly deal with specific goals and clearly define solution paths. One of the main questions is whether knowledge in a particular field increases the likelihood someone has of solving a problem effectively, or if this has more to do with certain internal capabilities and singular mental aptitudes that would enable a person to better get through the different levels of depth leading to an optimal solution. If this were the case, the mental model of the same problem, as projected by a novice or an expert, would markedly differ, with that of the latter showing a “cleaner” path. As an analogy, experts would be able to swiftly categorize new information by immediately “placing it” in the appropriate shelf of their mental organisation, while novices would struggle, try one position and then another, not knowing what goes where. To be clearer- skilled individuals would be capable of accessing a complex network of solutions without even being conscious of it, while novices wouldn’t even know “where to start”. In fact the ease with which experts solve problems is, among the most visible characteristics of skill, possibly the one that always catches the eye of a neophyte.
The Research paper on Skin Cancer and Expert Knowledge
The danger of being hit by an oncoming vehicle is always present, but manageable by recalling safety advice like the popular safety advice “Stop, Look and Listen”. However, some risks are not always obvious and we are dependent upon different types of knowledge generated by experts to help reveal them, but sometimes this expert knowledge can be contested and interpreted by lay people in society. ...
An essential question surrounding masterliness is whether anyone can become an expert in a given field, or if the requirements that are required for it have to match a set of innate capabilities. This is an old question- during several decades, it was common to characterise the debate around expertise as an antagonism between more and less intelligent individuals, therefore presenting the higher order mental processes which would enable one to become an expert as a given trait and not something that could be acquired through practise. But as mentioned above, novices and experts not only differ in their body of knowledge and procedural skills. Research has shown1 that from an intellectual point of view there might be essential characteristics which set apprentices and experts apart, such as information processing abilities and organisation skills. From a structural point of view, expert mental structures seem to contain fundamental principles and procedural knowledge (domain-specific strategies, or “knowing how”) and associations, whereas novice structures are based on superficial features and declarative knowledge (factual information, or “knowing what”).
According to Posner (1988), however, expertise is linked with a specific form of declarative knowledge, semantic memory, that is associated with meanings, ideas and concepts.
The Term Paper on Attitudes Toward Seeking Mental Health
Abstract According to the World Health Organisation an estimated 200 million people globally are affected by serious mental health problems, however, research evidence indicates that only around one-third of those experiencing mental health difficulties actually seek treatment. A number of psycho-social and demographic factors have been found to explain variation in attitudes towards, and ...
On the other hand, researchers such as Ericsson and Charness (1994) have through their research contradicted the idea that expertise is owed to the bestowal of superior mental capabilities by proving that practice is far more significant than it is commonly believed. They claim that repeated hours of mental training can have dramatic effects over skill as well as on the underlying brain structure, which can change as a response to intense and repeated activity. They arrived at these conclusions through studying the pioneering work on chess by De Groot (1946-1965), in which the thought processes of chess players of the highest two levels, Grand and Candidate masters, were examined. De Groot did this by famously asking them to reproduce the locations of chess pieces after a brief exposure to the board. He found significant differences between the recall of Grand Masters and that of less skilled players. However, replication of a similar experiment by Chase and Simon (1973), this time with a focus on random positions instead of customary moves, found little difference in recall. This finding seems to indicate that the superiority exhibited by Grand Masters in formal competitions might lay somewhere other than in their inherent mental processes. Instead, memory would appear to be an indispensable feature, by having decisive moves and winning positions committed to it and retrieved whenever necessary.
Because chess requires the use of complex cognitive operations and particular skill performance, it has been commonly used as a task environment for the study of expertise. De Groot’s studies signalled a shift from an emphasis on innate capabilities to a focus on experience, but are there fundamental differences between the operational microstructure of Grand Masters and Candidate Masters, or, for that matter, between the cognitive strategies used by trained individuals and novices in other professional fields? Is perhaps the way problems are solved the key to being experienced?
Chase and Simon used De Groot’s seminal work as a starting point to try and elucidate what exactly makes some people excel at mental tasks that other individuals find exceedingly tasking. They concluded that it is the manner in which information is stored and handled what mainly sets the difference between experts and novices. Their Chunking Theory explains how information is grouped as a single identity or unit of data, and is committed to long-term memory (LTM).
The Term Paper on What is Memory?
Memory refers to a mental process that is used to gain, gather, and recover information. The information that is stored in our memory with the help of our senses will be processed by numerous systems all through our brain, and it will be accumulated for later use (Mason, 2003-2006). Gordon and Berger (2003) said that there are two basic kinds of memory: ordinary and intelligent memory. Ordinary ...
Evidence for this strategy is found in how simple stimuli are inadvertently grouped into larger perceptual groups, its main benefit being that is allows the improvement of memory performance. As this innate feature can also be used in a deliberate and strategic way, chess masters would be capable of simplifying very complex operations through the use of chunking in the recognition of relevant patterns, thus converting certain positions into something analogous to a semantic unit. When positions and arrangements become familiar, chunks take the form of a relevant discriminated node, including information about the subsequent moves to execute. This use of Long Term memory is crucial, and seems to be what mainly sets novices and experts apart.
An elaboration from the Chunking Theory, and one that also has LTM as its main focus, is Gobet & Simon’s Template Theory. Its strength lies in that it unifies low-level aspects of cognition, such as the organisation of perceptual patterns into chunks, with higher aspects, such as strategy and planning. The theory assumes short-term memory has a limited capacity of around three to seven chunks, which wouldn’t be near enough potential for the myriad of variations needed in a top-class chess game. Hence, long-term memory needs to become the main player in these operations by actually being able to retain all the available options. The role of short-term memory would simply be to incorporate pointers to this information. The rationale of the approach is that repeated experience leads to the conversion of chunks into templates- these would be capable of containing several chunks, as well as slots to accommodate possible variable features. Short-term memory appears here as a more dynamic system than in Chase and Simon’s framework, as it can be accessed through different paths and can gradually grow to incorporate more information as the player becomes skilled. With more practice and the ensuing competence, the network of templates becomes more rich and complex, which would also explain the necessity of an extended amount of time in order to become someone who is worthy of being called an expert.
The Term Paper on Short Term Memory
Human memory is a major area of interest and study within the field of cognitive psychology and has been research intensively and is constantly being studied to establish new findings into the field of human memory. Quinlan & Dyson (2008). Many memory theorists have attempted to give their accounts of human memory systems by suggesting a number of Models in order to attempt to describe human ...
Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) took the basic tenets of the Template Theory and developed a theoretical framework for Long Term Working Memory (LTWM) which also aimed to explain the main characteristics of expert behaviour. They rejected the idea, present in Template Theory, of slots as structures which accommodate transient features, and instead organised their approach around two different components- a short-term working memory, available under all conditions but with a very limited capacity, and a long-term memory that would only be available at the point when one has become an expert, and is of unlimited capacity. Again, short-term memory is presented here as a relatively dynamic and temporal repository which would become useful in unfamiliar activities, while long-term memory would function as a task-specific and highly specialised module.
What they propose is that chess experts encode information by elaborating long-term memory schemas that have been fixed by repetition. This would explain why they would be better problem-solvers than novices, since it is practice that leads to having the mental skills and resources which allow for the successful encoding of task representations and later retrieval. Once encoded in LTM, instead of in the more unstable STM, tasks will be safeguarded from memory loss and fixed, becoming available units of information that can be used on demand. This mechanism would also explain why chess experts would be able to recall regular positions much better than novices, but wouldn’t stand out in memory of random configurations- expertise would be dependent on the time it takes to acquire a large body of patterns and to commit them to LTM. This pattern is here applied to chess, but is of course applicable to any other expert field.
Particularly interesting is how Ericsson and Kintsch emphasise the importance of the role of long-term memory in skill acquisition, and the fact that individual strategies might have an impact on success- they elaborate on the importance of cues which can act as operational pointers to stored information. Experts would be especially adept at encoding strategies which would aid in the retrieval of fixed concepts from LTM. This would be achieved by being able to commit only a few key concepts to STM, which would serve as cues to retrieve everything associated to them by what they call retrieval structures. These retrieval structures are memory mechanisms which result in a more efficient access to information. Hence, the attainment of expertise is characterised as a gradual refinement of mental strategies acquired through thousands of hours of deliberate practice, and the qualitative difference between novices and experts is interpreted as a result of conscious and careful study of master’s positions not as fixed images, but as distinct problems which require solving through elaborate mental operations.
The Term Paper on Malleable Memory
The study of memory dates back as far as the time of Ancient Greece, however, the birth of the study of memory is often credited to Ebbinghaus, who concentrated his research on memory store and capacity. The study of memory has had a long history, and still there are many myths associated with memory processes and the overall potential of memory. This paper will address one of the misconceptions ...
Arriving at the ideal solution will have involved going through the necessary steps which in turn lead to the fixing of reliable structures. Isolated strategies could help in carrying through this process; importantly, though, it is pointed out that although mnemonic-type procedures help with the encoding of relevant information they shouldn’t occur as an isolated process. That is, unlike individuals who train their memory with no other goal but to improve recall of random material, experts do not deliberately aim at this: it only occurs as a by-product of extensive training on complex representative tasks. The distinctive characteristic that will set them apart from novices, then, is not the ability to store but the readiness with which they store in an accessible form, permitting swift retrieval.
Although no single theory offers a comprehensive account capable of dealing with all the questions the study of expertise poses, they do agree on the general principle that experts and novices differ not only in the body of knowledge they have over the years acquired in their field of study, but most of all in their use of this information. Experts tend to show higher rates of cognitive activity, productivity, strategic knowledge and retrieval. They also seem to be more likely than novices to recognise meaningful patters of information, something which applies not only to chess but to a wide range of activities where complex cognitive operations such as selective search, memory for meaningful material or pattern recognition are required in order to succeed or arrive at a solution. This, however, must be seen as part of the learning curve and not as a display of innate capabilities. It is through efficient use of these cognitive tools that an expert can perform in a much more competent way than a novice.
The Essay on Neurological Memory Info Codes Process
The Human Memory The reason people exist is because of two important things: memory and language, which have been vital in the evolution of humanity. (Our ancestors needed language to explain how to light a fire to keep them warm and a memory to remember how to do it). So we have a memory because if we did not we would never have evolved far enough for you to ask this question in this place. So ...
Perhaps the use of brain imaging tools, with a precise discrimination of the areas involved in expertise, will provide new insights. Researchers are at present working with models that mirror the perceptual categorization and mechanism of recognition seen in human experts- this should pave the way towards a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying skill. A good model will hopefully capture the dynamics of the learning process, the cognitive differences that set novices and experts apart when arriving at decisions, and most of all the interaction of the brain mechanisms involved in such a complex process.
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