In the mid 70s a young researcher at Waterloo named Janet Starkes had an insight that changed ideas about why good athletes are good. It led to a a good deal of work on the acquisition of expertise. She had been a volleyball player as an undergrad and her familiarity with the sport led to her testing perceptual cognitive skills of volleyball players. In the process she invented the occlusion test. She showed players on the Canadian National Team brief flashes - sixteen thousandths of a second - of volleyball matches. Some had the ball in the frame while it had just exited the frame in others. The players had to say if the ball was visible or not. Unskilled observers find the task is impossible - all you see is a brief flash of light. Even studying the image for longer is difficult as the there's a confusion of visual information.
The players were able to correctly score the images at a much greater rate than chance. A few saw even more. In indoor volleyball the setter is the person who directs how the play will proceed. Good setters have what is often called court sense. Elite players seem to know where the players who are important to the developing play are and how they're moving. This court sense has been measured in elite players in other sports like basketball, soccer, hockey, and cricket.
The occlusion experiments have been repeated in sports like tennis and baseball to understand when a player knows what the near future may bring. They explain why Jenny Finch was able to strike out the best major league baseball players. They didn't understand her pitch and how the ball was moving - even though it was only traveling at 60 to 70 miles per hour. They were reduced to reacting to the moving ball - something that doesn't work in baseball. The elite players generally make their decisions on how to hit the ball around the time the pitcher releases it - sometimes just before. Much of the information they use comes from observing motions that lead up to and are part of the pitch.
Experiments with chess players show elite players can understand the board and how play is proceeding in a very short time even though, in theory, there are an enormous number of potential moves ahead. When experimenters then displayed images of boards with impossible or extremely unlikely arrangements of pieces, the elites were reduced to the level of raw beginners. Just like the major league baseball players facing Jenny Finch. The view is the chess players and elite athletes break information down into something of a mental shorthand - "chucks" of information. When they are presented with a chunk or series of chunks they're familiar with they know, usually without thinking, how to proceed.
The brain is "plastic." It takes a good deal of time and effort to develop relevant neural libraries of these chunks.. sometimes a childhood of playing and learning at a variety of levels in many activities. London cabbies are interesting example. It may not be the case now with GPS navigation, but cabbies had to pass an extremely difficult test of their knowledge of the city's streets that usually requires over a year of study. MRI scans show the cab drivers have a much larger portion of their hippocampus - an enlargement that came from that study. Musicians show enlarged regions as do people who learn multiple languages at an early age. It turns out early music and language skills are useful for certain types of reasoning, so perhaps it's good to encourage these skills. Or maybe not.
What does it mean when we don't develop certain mental skills - when we don't build the pathways. It's clear I'll never play, or even react to volleyball at an elite level.. the wiring isn't there even if I had the physical skills. But what if I had never learned how to navigate using maps and looking for signs in nature where I don't have maps. There's some evidence those skills are very useful for grappling with geometry - particularly the more abstract kind math and physics majors see in college. Will an over reliance on GPS damage certain types of abstract thinking? Does it matter?
As various forms of "AI" take over tasks will it free us for other forms of thinking, or will it damage our ability to excel in some areas? It's speculation at this point, but given how difficult it is to get good at something and that getting good at one thing can be useful in other areas, it strikes me as an interesting area of study. Some technologies may enhance, others may handicap.
And in some areas this chunking of information can get you into trouble when a novel approach is called for. That's when broad and seemingly unrelated connections become important. The folks who excel at this are deep enough library of chunks that they recognize this takes something else and manage to patch together something novel. But that's another story.
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