The Paradox of Human Expertise: Why Experts Can Get It Wrong

Expertise is correctly, but one-sidedly, associated with special abilities and enhanced performance. The other side of expertise, however, is surreptitiously hidden. Along with expertise, performance may also be degraded, culminating in a lack of flexibility and error. Expertise is demystified by explaining the brain functions and cognitive architecture involved in being an expert. These information processing mechanisms, the very making of expertise, entail computational trade-offs that sometimes result in paradoxical functional degradation. For example, being an expert entails using schemas, selective attention, chunking information, automaticity, and more reliance on top-down information, all of which allow experts to perform quickly and efficiently; however, these very mechanisms restrict flexibility and control, may cause the experts to miss and ignore important information, introduce tunnel vision and bias, and can cause other effects that degrade performance. Such phenomena are apparent in a wide range of expert domains, from medical professionals and forensic examiners, to military fighter pilots and financial traders

Varieties of Cognitive Integration

Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration—cluster-model functionalism—which finds application in both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat

The effect of metacognitive training on confidence and strategic reminder setting

Individuals often choose between remembering information using their own memory ability versus using external resources to reduce cognitive demand (i.e. ‘cognitive offloading’). For example, to remember a future appointment an individual could choose to set a smartphone reminder or depend on their unaided memory ability. Previous studies investigating strategic reminder setting found that participants set more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias towards reminder-setting was predicted by metacognitive underconfidence in unaided memory ability. Due to the link between underconfidence in memory ability and excessive reminder setting, the aim of the current study was to investigate whether metacognitive training is an effective intervention to a) improve metacognitive judgment accuracy, and b) reduce bias in strategic offloading behaviour. Participants either received metacognitive training which involved making performance predictions and receiving feedback on judgment accuracy, or were part of a control group. As predicted, metacognitive training increased judgment accuracy: participants in the control group were significantly underconfident in their memory ability, whereas the experimental group showed no significant metacognitive bias. However, contrary to predictions, both experimental and control groups were significantly biased toward reminder-setting, and did not differ significantly. Therefore, reducing metacognitive bias was not sufficient to eliminate the bias towards reminders. We suggest that the reminder bias likely results in part from erroneous metacognitive evaluations, but that other factors such as a preference to avoid cognitive effort may also be relevant. Finding interventions to mitigate these factors could improve the adaptive use of external resources

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution

The Web is becoming humankind's Cognitive Commons, where knowledge is created and curated collaboratively. We trace its origins from the advent of language around 300,000 years ago to a recent series of milestones to which the University of Southampton has contributed, helping Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA IR contents, and OA mandates to grow through the posting of the Subversive Proposal in 1994, the creation of CogPrints in 1997, the OpCit citation-linking project in 1999, the creation of the Eprints IR software in 2000, the Citebase citation-linking engine in 2001, the ROAR repository in 2002, the adoption and promotion of OA mandates (beginning with the ECS Southampton mandate, the world's first, in 2002), the creation of the ROARMAP mandates registry in 2003, and the ongoing bibliography of the Open Access Impact Advantage since 2004

Open Access Archivangelist: the last interview?

Our special guest today is Stevan Harnad, a prominent figure in the Open Access movement. Author of the famous 'Subversive Proposal', founder of 'Psycoloquy' and the Journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, creator and administrator of AmSciForum, one of the main coordinators of CogPrints initiative – the list could be stretched far beyond that – he doesn't really need introduction for anyone not wholly a stranger to the story of the Open Access movement. A cognitive scientist specialising in categorization, communication andconsciousness, Harnad is Professor of cognitive sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal and University of Southampton, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and doctor honoris causa, University of Liège. But even his polemics with John Searle about the Chinese Room didn't become as famous and influential as his Open Accessadvocacy

Moderación de sesiones colaborativas a través de la virtualización de la técnica de Metaplan

Este artículo presenta la virtualización de diferentes etapas de una técnica de moderación grupal denominada “Metaplan”. El formato original de la técnica se desarrolla bajo modalidad presencial y se aborda la estrategia de resolución de problemas mediante técnicas de visualización y preguntas. Se desarrolló el estudio y revisión de cada una de las etapas para proponer la virtualización del proceso. El trabajo se enmarca dentro del desarrollo de una tesina de grado en la Facultad de Informática de la UNLP. Se presenta un prototipo que permite la virtualización del Metpalan para ampliar el alcance de la técnica y facilitar el trabajo colaborativo del equipo. Se analizan los aspectos de tiempo, espacio, estilo y ritmo de cada alumno para las etapas virtuales procurando la autonomía en el desarrollo de la resolución de casos/ problemas. Se analizan los resultados obtenidos y se muestra la separación de las etapas a trabajar en forma virtual y presencial. Finalmente se desarrolla una propuesta metodológica de utilización de Metaplan en formato virtual.XI Workshop tecnología informática aplicada en educaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

The impact of human-technology cooperation and distributed cognition in forensic science: biasing effects of AFIS contextual information on human experts*

Experts play a critical role in forensic decision making, even when cognition is offloaded and distributed between human and machine. In this paper, we investigated the impact of using Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) on human decision makers. We provided 3680 AFIS lists (a total of 55,200 comparisons) to 23 latent fingerprint examiners as part of their normal casework. We manipulated the position of the matching print in the AFIS list. The data showed that latent fingerprint examiners were affected by the position of the matching print in terms of false exclusions and false inconclusives. Furthermore, the data showed that false identification errors were more likely at the top of the list and that such errors occurred even when the correct match was present further down the list. These effects need to be studied and considered carefully, so as to optimize human decision making when using technologies such as AFIS

Age-related differences in memory when offloading important information.

People can choose to use external memory aids and offload information to help them remember it, but it is unclear how objective and subjective value or importance influence offloading decisions in younger and older adults. We presented younger adults (n = 99; age range: 18-31) and older adults (n = 93; age range: 60-96) with items to remember for a later test and allowed them to offload a subset of the presented items. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered information was lists of associated words paired with point values counting toward participants scores if recalled. In Experiment 2, the to-be-remembered information was lists of items along a theme, such as packing for vacation, which differed in subjective value. Results revealed that when words were paired with objective point values, younger adults were more selective in their offloading decisions and subsequent recall than older adults (i.e., younger adults were more likely to offload and recall high-value items than low-value items relative to older adults). When the to-be-remembered items instead differed in subjective value, older adults were more selective in their offloading decisions than younger adults. Specifically, older adults were more likely to offload words they rated as important relative to items they rated as less important while younger adults displayed the opposite pattern-younger adults were more likely to offload words they rated as less important compared with items they rated as more important. This difference in offloading tendencies when to-be-remembered information varies in subjective value may be indicative of older adults engaging in a form of metacognitive control that can help ensure the use of responsible remembering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)