An expert is somebody who has a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education in a particular field or area of study. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study. Experts are called in for advice on their respective subject, but they do not always agree on the particulars of a field of study. An expert can be believed, by virtue of credentials, training, education, profession, publication or experience, to have special knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially rely upon the individual's opinion on that topic. Historically, an expert was referred to as a sage. The individual was usually a profound thinker distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.
A child prodigy is a person near the age of ten who produces meaningful work in some domain at the level of an adult expert. The term is also applied more broadly to describe young people who are extraordinarily talented in some field.
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than the individual's actual first language. Generally, to state a language as a mother tongue, one must have full native fluency in that language.
In cognitive psychology, chunking is a process by which small individual pieces of a set of information are bound together to create a meaningful whole later on in memory. The chunks, by which the information is grouped, are meant to improve short-term retention of the material, thus bypassing the limited capacity of working memory and allowing the working memory to be more efficient. A chunk is a collection of basic units that are strongly associated with one another, and have been grouped together and stored in a person's memory. These chunks can be retrieved easily due to their coherent grouping. It is believed that individuals create higher-order cognitive representations of the items within the chunk. The items are more easily remembered as a group than as the individual items themselves. These chunks can be highly subjective because they rely on an individual's perceptions and past experiences, which are linked to the information set. The size of the chunks generally ranges from two to six items but often differs based on language and culture.
Movements in cognitive science are considered to be post-cognitivist if they are opposed to or move beyond the cognitivist theories posited by Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, David Marr, and others.
Cognitive apprenticeship is a theory that emphasizes the importance of the process in which a master of a skill teaches that skill to an apprentice.
A physical symbol system takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them to produce new expressions.
Competence is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable and improve the efficiency or performance of a job. Competency is a series of knowledge, abilities, skills, experiences and behaviors, which leads to effective performance in an individual's activities. Competency is measurable and can be developed through training.
Gary Klein is a research psychologist famous for pioneering in the field of naturalistic decision making. By studying experts such as firefighters in their natural environment, he discovered that laboratory models could not adequately describe decision making under time pressure and uncertainty. His recognition-primed decision (RPD) model has influenced changes in the ways the Marines and Army train their officers to make decisions. The concept of expertise has been central to the models he has developed, the research he has conducted, and the training and design efforts he has accomplished.
Adaptive expertise is a broad construct that encompasses a range of cognitive, motivational, and personality-related components, as well as habits of mind and dispositions. Generally, problem-solvers demonstrate adaptive expertise when they are able to efficiently solve previously encountered tasks and generate new procedures for new tasks. This definition can be contrasted with more traditional ideas of expertise popularized by Chi and others, which do not typically consider adaptation to completely novel situations. Its empirical validity has been examined in a number of training and learning contexts. The term was first coined by Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki, to tease out the variability within groups of experts. Hatano and Inagaki, described two types of expertise: routine expertise, or classic expertise, and adaptive expertise. They defined routine expertise as involving mastering procedures in such a way as to become highly efficient and accurate, whereas developing adaptive expertise requires an individual to develop conceptual understanding that allows the "expert" to invent new solutions to problems and even new procedures for solving problems. To illustrate, imagine two sushi chefs: one who makes every piece perfectly but routinely makes the same few types over and over, and one produces new menus frequently. To some, this is an unfair comparison, as ones' environment supports behavior. For example, the routine of the classic expert sushi chef may be tied to his restaurant environment, and this chef may be able to break out of the routines easily given a different situation. However, the adaptive expert chef clearly demonstrates flexible knowledge and performance of sushi-making. Learning Scientists are interested in adaptive expertise, in part because they would like to understand the types of learning trajectories that may allow practitioners break free from routines when necessary.
Hubert Dreyfus was a critic of artificial intelligence research. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI(1965), What Computers Can't Do and Mind over Machine(1986), he presented a pessimistic assessment of AI's progress and a critique of the philosophical foundations of the field. Dreyfus' objections are discussed in most introductions to the philosophy of artificial intelligence, including Russell & Norvig (2021), a standard AI textbook, and in Fearn (2007), a survey of contemporary philosophy.
The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model is a process reference model originally developed and endorsed by the Supply Chain Council, now a part of ASCM, as the cross-industry, standard diagnostic tool for supply chain management. The SCOR model describes the business activities associated with satisfying a customer's demand, which include plan, source, make, deliver, return, and enable. Use of the model includes analyzing the current state of a company's processes and goals, quantifying operational performance, and comparing company performance to benchmark data. SCOR has developed a set of metrics for supply chain performance, and ASCM members have formed industry groups to collect best practices information that companies can use to elevate their supply chain models.
Practice is the act of rehearsing a behavior repeatedly, to help learn and eventually master a skill. The word derives from the Greek "πρακτική" (praktike), feminine of "πρακτικός" (praktikos), "fit for or concerned with action, practical", and that from the verb "πράσσω" (prasso), "to achieve, bring about, effect, accomplish".
CHREST is a symbolic cognitive architecture based on the concepts of limited attention, limited short-term memories, and chunking. The architecture takes into low-level aspects of cognition such as reference perception, long and short-term memory stores, and methodology of problem-solving and high-level aspects such as the use of strategies. Learning, which is essential in the architecture, is modelled as the development of a network of nodes (chunks) which are connected in various ways. This can be contrasted with Soar and ACT-R, two other cognitive architectures, which use productions for representing knowledge. CHREST has often been used to model learning using large corpora of stimuli representative of the domain, such as chess games for the simulation of chess expertise or child-directed speech for the simulation of children's development of language. In this respect, the simulations carried out with CHREST have a flavour closer to those carried out with connectionist models than with traditional symbolic models.
The worked-example effect is a learning effect predicted by cognitive load theory. Specifically, it refers to improved learning observed when worked examples are used as part of instruction, compared to other instructional techniques such as problem-solving and discovery learning. According to Sweller: "The worked example effect is the best known and most widely studied of the cognitive load effects".
The apprentice perspective is an educational theory of apprenticeship concerning the process of learning through active participation in the practices of the desired skills, such as during workplace training. By working with other practitioners, an apprentice can learn the duties and skills associated with the position without formal teaching. In the process of training, apprentices also have the chance to specialize; as they are supervised, their specific talents and contributions within the field are taken into account and integrated into the overall practice.
U-shaped development, also known as U-shaped learning, is the typical pattern by which select physical, artistic, and cognitive skills are developed. It is called “U” shape development because of the shape of the letter U in correlation to a graph, skills developed in the “U shaped” fashion begin on a high position on a graph's Y-axis. The skills start out at a high performance level and over time the skills descend to a lower position on the Y-axis. After another period of time the skill once again ascends to a higher position on the y-axis. A U-shaped time line is created of the skills development. U-shaped development can be seen in cognitive skills such as learning new words, or doing high-level algorithms in mathematics. The skill can also be artistic such as painting or playing a musical instrument, and physical skills such a walking and weight lifting.
The curse of knowledge, also called the curse of expertise or expert's curse, is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge assumes that others share in that knowledge.
Intuition in the context of decision-making is defined as a "non-sequential information-processing mode." It is distinct from insight and can be contrasted with the deliberative style of decision-making. Intuition can influence judgment through either emotion or cognition, and there has been some suggestion that it may be a means of bridging the two. Individuals use intuition and more deliberative decision-making styles interchangeably, but there has been some evidence that people tend to gravitate to one or the other style more naturally. People in a good mood gravitate toward intuitive styles, while people in a bad mood tend to become more deliberative. The specific ways in which intuition actually influences decisions remain poorly understood.
Patricia Sawyer Benner is a nursing theorist, academic and author. She is known for one of her books, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice (1984). Benner described the stages of learning and skill acquisition across the careers of nurses, applying the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to nursing practice. Benner is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Francisco UCSF School of Nursing.
