An aesthetic for adaptations: going beyond knowledge and skills in explanations of adaptations

Adaptive expertise is often defined by the presence of both procedural and conceptual knowledge. While knowledge and skills can explain how people find a new path when confronted with a difficulty (a fault-driven adaptation), something else is needed to explain when and why people make a beneficial, but unnecessary change (a prospective adaptation). In an interview, participants gave examples of adaptations from their everyday lives. Their examples appeared to arise from aesthetic judgments, not from a conceptual understanding of the domain. These findings suggest that values and aesthetics ought to be a more explicit focus of research on adaptive expertise. How are some experts able to adapt to new situations and make effective changes when needed, while others can become stuck in routines? Most studies of expertise emphasize the quantity and structure of experts’ knowledge (e.g., Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), and the fluency and efficiency of their skills (e.g., Biederman & Schiffrar, 1987). Hatano and Inagaki (1986) distinguish between routine and adaptive expertise, and state that, while routines require only procedural knowledge, adaptations also require conceptual knowledge so that experts can consider alternatives and invent new approaches to problems. Viewing adaptations as conceptuallydriven responses to difficulties can effectively explain what can be called fault-driven adaptations, which arise in response to a specific difficulty, or impasse. However, this account has more difficulty explaining prospective adaptations, which are changes that are beneficial, but not strictly necessary (Martin & Schwartz, in preparation). For example, Martin and Schwartz (2007) had students work on a medical diagnosis task. They found that graduate students spent a significant amount time at the onset of the task creating an external representation (e.g., a contingency table) of the information in the reference materials. Although undergraduates were capable of creating external representations when access to reference materials was restricted, they did not do so spontaneously, but instead worked with the materials as given. The difference between the groups arose not from what students knew, but rather from what they chose to do. These results suggest that conceptual and procedural knowledge are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain prospective adaptations. Little research has been conducted on unprompted, prospective adaptations. To investigate potential sources for prospective adaptations, adults (graduate and undergraduate students) were asked, in a semistructured interview, for examples from their lives where they made a prospective adaptation.