Expertise and the Interaction between Different Perceptual-Cognitive Skills: Implications for Testing and Training

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in exploring the nature of perceptual-cognitive expertise across a range of domains, such as emergency medicine (e.g., McRobert et al., 2013), music (e.g., Pearce, 2015), military combat (e.g., Williams et al., 2008), aviation (e.g., Palmisano and Gillam, 2005), and sport (e.g., Williams and Ford, 2008; Roca et al., 2011). Perceptual-cognitive expertise refers to the ability of an individual to identify and process environmental information for integration with existing and ongoing knowledge to facilitate response selection (Marteniuk, 1976). For example, in sport, experts have been shown to possess superior perceptual-cognitive skills when compared with their less-expert counterparts. These skills include: (a) postural cue usage, which is the ability to pick-up early or advance cues emanating from the postural orientation of opponents (Savelsbergh et al., 2005; Abernethy and Zawi, 2007); (b) pattern recognition, which is the capacity to recognize task-specific patterns and structure in an evolving situation (Williams et al., 2006; North et al., 2009); and (c) situational probabilities, which is the superior ability to generate more accurate predictions as to what others are likely to do in any given situation (Farrow and Reid, 2012). While considerable effort has been devoted to identifying each of these perceptual-cognitive skills using controlled, experimental tasks, limited effort has been devoted to exploring the complex interactions between these skills and the implications for testing and training across domains.