Season of birth and chess expertise

The origin of talent and expertise is currently the subject of intense debate, with explanations ranging from purely biological to purely environmental. This report shows that the population of expert chess players in the north hemisphere shows a seasonal pattern, with an excess of births in late winter and early spring. This effect remains when taking into account the distribution of births in the population at large, using statistics from the European Union member countries. A similar pattern has been found with schizophrenia, and the possible link between these two phenomena is discussed

A model of emotional influence on memory processing.

To survive in a complex environment, agents must be able to encode information about the utility value of the objects they meet. We propose a neuroscience-based model aiming to explain how a new memory is associated to an emotional response. The same theoretical framework also explains the effects of emotion on memory recall. The originality of our approach is to postulate the presence of two central processing units (CPUs): one computing only emotional information, and the other mainly concerned with cognitive processing. The emotional CPU, which is phylogenetically older, is assumed to modulate the cognitive CPU, which is more recent. The article first deals with the cognitive part of the model by highlighting the set of processes underlying memory recognition and storage. Then, building on this theoretical background, the emotional part highlights how the emotional response is computed and stored. The last section describes the interplay between the cognitive and emotional systems

Expertise and intuition: A tale of three theories

Several authors have hailed intuition as one of the defining features of expertise. In particular, while disagreeing on almost anything that touches on human cognition and artificial intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus and Herbert Simon agreed on this point. However, the highly influential theories of intuition they proposed differed in major ways, especially with respect to the role given to search and as to whether intuition is holistic or analytic. Both theories suffer from empirical weaknesses. In this paper, we show how, with some additions, a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory) offers a coherent and wide-ranging explanation of intuition in expert behaviour. It is shown that the theory accounts for the key features of intuition: it explains the rapid onset of intuition and its perceptual nature, provides mechanisms for learning, incorporates processes showing how perception is linked to action and emotion, and how experts capture the entirety of a situation. In doing so, the new theory addresses the issues problematic for Dreyfus’s and Simon’s theories. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Towards an alternative to Benner’s theory of expert intuition in nursing: A discussion paper

Several authors have highlighted the role of intuition in expertise. In particular, a large amount of data has been collected about intuition in expert nursing, and intuition plays an important role in the influential theory of nursing expertise developed by Benner (1984). We discuss this theory, and highlight both data that support it and data that challenge it. Based on this assessment, we propose a new theory of nursing expertise and intuition, which emphasizes how perception and conscious problem solving are intimately related. In the discussion, we propose that this theory opens new avenues of enquiry for research into nursing expertise

ERP to chess stimuli reveal expert-novice differences in the amplitudes of N2 and P3 components

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Society for Psychophysiological Research.ERP experiments were conducted to analyze the underlying neural events when chess players make simple judgments of a board position. Fourteen expert players and 14 age-matched novices viewed, for each of four tasks, 128 unique positions on a mini (4 × 4) chess board each presented for 0.5 s. The tasks were to respond: (a) if white king was in check, (b) if black knight was present, (c) if white king was not in check, and (d) if no black knight was present. Experts showed an enhanced N2 with check targets and a larger P3 with knight targets, relative to novices. Expert-novice differences in posterior N2 began as early as 240 ms on check-related searches. Results were consistent with the view that prolonged N2 components reflect matching of current perceptual input to memory, and thus are sensitive to experts' superior pattern recognition and memory retrieval of chunks

Visual search in ecological and non-ecological displays: Evidence for a non-monotonic effect of complexity on performance

Copyright @ 2013 PLoSThis article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Considerable research has been carried out on visual search, with single or multiple targets. However, most studies have used artificial stimuli with low ecological validity. In addition, little is known about the effects of target complexity and expertise in visual search. Here, we investigate visual search in three conditions of complexity (detecting a king, detecting a check, and detecting a checkmate) with chess players of two levels of expertise (novices and club players). Results show that the influence of target complexity depends on level of structure of the visual display. Different functional relationships were found between artificial (random chess positions) and ecologically valid (game positions) stimuli: With artificial, but not with ecologically valid stimuli, a “pop out” effect was present when a target was visually more complex than distractors but could be captured by a memory chunk. This suggests that caution should be exercised when generalising from experiments using artificial stimuli with low ecological validity to real-life stimuli.This study is funded by Brunel University and the article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

From DNA sequence to application: possibilities and complications

The development of sophisticated genetic tools during the past 15 years have facilitated a tremendous increase of fundamental and application-oriented knowledge of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and their bacteriophages. This knowledge relates both to the assignments of open reading frames (ORF’s) and the function of non-coding DNA sequences. Comparison of the complete nucleotide sequences of several LAB bacteriophages has revealed that their chromosomes have a fixed, modular structure, each module having a set of genes involved in a specific phase of the bacteriophage life cycle. LAB bacteriophage genes and DNA sequences have been used for the construction of temperature-inducible gene expression systems, gene-integration systems, and bacteriophage defence systems. The function of several LAB open reading frames and transcriptional units have been identified and characterized in detail. Many of these could find practical applications, such as induced lysis of LAB to enhance cheese ripening and re-routing of carbon fluxes for the production of a specific amino acid enantiomer. More knowledge has also become available concerning the function and structure of non-coding DNA positioned at or in the vicinity of promoters. In several cases the mRNA produced from this DNA contains a transcriptional terminator-antiterminator pair, in which the antiterminator can be stabilized either by uncharged tRNA or by interaction with a regulatory protein, thus preventing formation of the terminator so that mRNA elongation can proceed. Evidence has accumulated showing that also in LAB carbon catabolite repression in LAB is mediated by specific DNA elements in the vicinity of promoters governing the transcription of catabolic operons. Although some biological barriers have yet to be solved, the vast body of scientific information presently available allows the construction of tailor-made genetically modified LAB. Today, it appears that societal constraints rather than biological hurdles impede the use of genetically modified LAB.

Scanpath analysis of expertise and culture in teacher gaze in real-world classrooms

Humans are born to learn by understanding where adults look. This is likely to extend into the classroom, making teacher gaze an important topic for study. Expert teacher gaze has mainly been investigated in the laboratory, and has focused mostly on one cognitive process: teacher attentional (i.e., information-seeking) gaze. No known research has made direct cultural comparisons of teacher gaze or successfully found expert–novice differences outside Western settings. Accordingly, we conducted a real-world study of expert teacher gaze across two cultural settings, exploring communicative (i.e., information-giving) as well as attentional gaze. Forty secondary school teachers wore eye-tracking glasses, with 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from the UK and 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from Hong Kong. We used a novel eye-tracking scanpath analysis to ascertain the importance of expertise and culture, individually and as a combination. Attentional teacher scanpaths were significantly more similar within than across expertise and expertise + culture sub-groups; communicative scanpaths were significantly more similar within than across expertise and culture. Detailed analysis suggests that (1) expert teachers refer back to students constantly through focused gaze during both attentional and communicative gaze and that (2) expert teachers in Hong Kong scan students more than experts do in the UK

Chess databases as a research vehicle in psychology : modeling large data

The game of chess has often been used for psychological investigations, particularly in cognitive science. The clear-cut rules and well-defined environment of chess provide a model for investigations of basic cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, and problem solving, while the precise rating system for the measurement of skill has enabled investigations of individual differences and expertise-related effects. In the present study, we focus on another appealing feature of chess—namely, the large archive databases associated with the game. The German national chess database presented in this study represents a fruitful ground for the investigation of multiple longitudinal research questions, since it collects the data of over 130,000 players and spans over 25 years. The German chess database collects the data of all players, including hobby players, and all tournaments played. This results in a rich and complete collection of the skill, age, and activity of the whole population of chess players in Germany. The database therefore complements the commonly used expertise approach in cognitive science by opening up new possibilities for the investigation of multiple factors that underlie expertise and skill acquisition. Since large datasets are not common in psychology, their introduction also raises the question of optimal and efficient statistical analysis. We offer the database for download and illustrate how it can be used by providing concrete examples and a step-by-step tutorial using different statistical analyses on a range of topics, including skill development over the lifetime, birth cohort effects, effects of activity and inactivity on skill, and gender differences