Has the Study of Skilled or Exceptional Performance Told Us Anything about the Way Ordinary Cognitio

... Has the Study of Skilled or Exceptional Performance Told Us Anything about the Way Ordinary Cognitio "An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them." Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976. Studies comparing the performance of experts and novices have proliferated in recent years. The range of tasks explored has been impressive, spanning classical conditioning (eg. Woodruff-Pak & Thompson, 1988), simple perceptual motor (eg. Salthouse & Somberg, 1982), memorizing digits (Kliegl, Smith & Baltes, 1989), face-name and list learning (Yesavage, Sheikh, Friedman & Tanke, 1990), and even intelligence test performance (eg. Willis & Schaie, 1986). By focusing on the dimension of expertise, researchers hope to learn more about the nature and acquisition of cognitive skills. In analysing what the study of skilled performance has told us about "ordinary cognition", it must be borne in mind that most of our everyday activity is

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