Volume 1, Issue 3

Researchers who study expertise are faced with a number of statistical and methodological challenges, including small sample sizes, range restriction, and concerns surrounding research design. Recent trends in psychological science point to the need for increased transparency and a greater emphasis on the reproducibility of research findings. In this article, I discuss lessons that expertise researchers can draw from the greater open science community and the reproducibility crisis to combat challenges inherent to the study of expertise.

In this article we propose that expertise can be best explained as the interaction of the varying constraints/characteristics of the environment and of the individual, framed by the ecological dynamics approach. This rationale of expert performance is contrasted with the typical way that science has approached the study of expertise: i.e., by looking for constraints, located in the individual, either nurture- or nature-based, and related to high performance levels. In ecological dynamics, the base unit of analysis for understanding expertise is the individual-environment system. Illustrating this perspective with Bob Beamon’s 8.90 m long jump, whose 1968 world-record jump was substantially longer than any previous, we argue that expert performers should not be seen as an agglomeration of genes, traits, or mental dispositions and capacities. Rather, expert performance can be captured by the dynamically-varying, functional relationship between the constraints imposed by the environment and the resources of each individual performer.

Long-term working memory (LT-WM) theory is a 1995 framework for understanding how experts learn skills to select relevant information, encode it into episodic long-term memory, and then retrieve it at a later time by regenerating those meaningful cues. I review the historical context in which LT-WM was proposed, including the belief that interference made long-term memory unsuitable for meeting the needs of working memory, and the changing state of working memory theories in the 1990s. I also describe a competing account called template theory that proposes that experts can rapidly store some kinds of information in episodic LTM using slotted schemas. Next, I assess some of the shortcomings of the LT-WM theory and template theory, suggesting critical areas for further research. One need is to generate adequate predictive models based on LT-WM, and to compare predictions to template theory to fully understand how working memory functions in various areas of expertise. Another is to explore how changing conceptions of working memory capacity should alter our views of the predictions of LT-WM, and to update the theory’s predictions with contemporary findings.

The aim of this paper is to provide explanation and discussion on how unconventional socio-cultural constraints influence the development of skill and expertise of Brazilian football players. On this basis, the central question of this research is this: What are the influential environmental constraints on the development of perceptual-motor skills and expertise of Brazilian football players? The epistemological and methodological assumptions of the “contextualised skill acquisition research” (CSAR) (see Uehara et al., 2014) are used as an underpinning framework for data collection and organization of material. Drawing upon the notion of ethnographic strategies of inquiry for generating and analyzing data, we used qualitative methods such as contextual analysis, participant-observation, and open-ended interviews. At the micro-level of Brazilian society “pelada” emerges as one of the socio-cultural constraints that shapes the talent of Brazilian football players by influencing the development of their perceptual-motor expertise.