Expertise and the memorial substrate of skill execution

This area of work concerns the declarative accessibility, or openness to introspection and report, of skill knowledge, processes, and procedures at different levels of expertise. We have hypothesized that to the extent that high level skill execution is supported by procedural knowledge that operates largely outside of working memory, episodic memories for the step-by-step unfolding of particular instances of performance may be impoverished. This idea is motivated by the assumption that one needs to explicitly attend to a stimulus in order to maximize the chances of encoding it and later being able to retrieve this information from memory in a form that is explicitly reportable. In order to test these claims regarding the memorial consequences of on-line attention deployment, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of studies comparing episodic memories of specific performances and domain-specific generic knowledge of experienced and novice individuals. In one experiment utilizing the sensorimotor task of golf putting as our testing venue, novice and expert golfers took a series of golf putts on an indoor putting green and, following specific putts, completed either a generic knowledge or episodic memory protocol. Results demonstrated that while experienced golfers were able to give extremely detailed accounts of the steps involved in taking a “typical” or “generic” golf putt in comparison to novices, their memories for specific instances of performance were degraded in relation to both their general skill knowledge and the episodic memories of performance generated by less skilled individuals. We have termed this memory phenomenon expertise-induced amnesia, whereby high level skill knowledge that normally operates largely outside the scope of conscious attention becomes substantially closed to explicit analysis and report. Moreover, we have demonstrated that expertise-induced amnesia can be eliminated if skilled performers are forced to attend to execution in a way they are not normally accustomed to. However, enhanced episodic performance memories come at a cost. In golf putting, for example, forcing expert golfers to attend to performance by having them putt with an unusual golf putter (e.g. a putter with an s-shaped and arbitrarily weighted shaft) improves episodic performance memories, yet results in decrements in putting accuracy under difficult or demanding performance conditions.

Select Relevant Publications:

Beilock, S. L. (2007). Understanding skilled performance: Memory, attention, and “choking under pressure.” In Morris, Terry, and Gordon (Eds.), Sport & Exercise Psychology: International Perspectives (pp. 153-166).Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology. (pdf)

Beilock, S. L., Wierenga, S. A., & Carr, T. H. (2002). Expertise, attention, and memory in sensorimotor skill execution: Impact of novel task constraints on dual-task performance and episodic memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 55, 1211-1240. (pdf)

Beilock, S. L. & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 701-725. (pdf)