Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
K. Anders Ericsson
Department of Psychology
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, USA
An impressive body of empirical evidence on the acquisition of expert performance and expertise has
been summarized and reviewed in the recently published Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and
Expert Performance. Most of this evidence has been collected in domains of expertise, where
performance can publicly observed and even objectively measured by public performances by
musicians, dancers, chess players, and athletes. In these domains the past and current engagement
in specially designed practice (deliberate practice) has been found to explain how the performance of
experts is qualitatively different from enthusiastic amateurs in music, sport, and games, and how this
type of practice can lead to physiological changes, such as increased size of hearts and thickness of
bones, as well as to complex cognitive mechanisms permitting superior anticipation of events and
improved ability to plan and reason.
In this presentation I will discuss how this theoretical framework has already been applied and
how it could be further extended to the study of the measurement and enhanced development of
professional performance. One of the key issues is how some individuals restructure their professional
activities so the quality can and will be regularly evaluated to provide detailed and reliable feedback to
guide deliberate practice in designed practice environments. Factors that promote the engagement in
deliberate practice in professional environments and the attainment and maintenance of high levels of
performance will be discussed.
His dissertation (Ericsson, 1976) examined how verbal reports on cognitive processes
provided insight into the structure of problem solving on the 8-puzzle. In collaboration
with Herbert Simon he proposed a model of the processes involved in verbalization of
sequences of thought and showed how some verbal report requirements, such as
generations of explanation, have reactive effects on the studied cognitive processes
whereas other reporting procedures, such as think-aloud and retrospective reports,
valid data on thought processes. This work was initially published in Psychological
Review (Ericsson & Simon, 1980) and then expanded into a book "Protocol Analysis:
Verbal Reports as Data" (Ericsson & Simon, 1984) which was subsequently revised
(Ericsson & Simon, 1993). With Bill Chase he studied the acquisition of a vastly
improved digit-span in college students (Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980) and they
developed the Theory of Skilled Memory (Chase & Ericsson, 1982; Ericsson & Chase,
1982) to explain their findings and other data on exceptional memory performance.
With Walter Kintsch he extended this theory into Long-Term Working Memory
(Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) to account also for the superior working memory of expert
performers and memory experts (Ericsson, 1985; Ericsson & Polson, 1988).
His current research concerns the structure and acquisition of expert performance and
in particular how expert performers acquire and maintain their superior performance
by extended deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1998; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer,
1993; Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996; Krampe & Ericsson,
1996, Lehmann & Ericsson, 1998a). He has edited books on the structure of expertise
"Toward a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits" (Ericsson & Smith,
1991) and the acquisition of expert performance "The Road to Excellence: The
Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games"
(Ericsson, 1996). For some recent reviews of the continuing work on expert performance
(see Ericsson, 1998, 1999, in press), on Long-term working memory (LTWM) (see
Ericsson & Delaney, 1998, 1999; Ericsson & Kintsch (in press); Ericsson, Patel &
Kintsch, 2000) on protocol analysis (see Crutcher & Ericsson, 2000; Ericsson & Simon,
1998) and expert performance in music (see Lehmann & Ericsson, 1998a, 1998b, 1999).
References
Ericsson, K. A., Patel, V. L., & Kintsch, W. (2000). How experts' adaptations
to representative task demands account for the expertise effect in memory
recall: Comment on Vicente and Wang (1998). Psychological Review, 107.