effect of experience on cognitive ability
- Experience influences cognitive abilities
- Experience in different areas influences the way that people perceive, attend, remember and learn information
Visual search
Visual search is more efficient for objects within the area of expertise
Hershler and Hochstein (2009): Car and bird experts were quicker to find objects from their own area of
expertise (also Golan et al., 2014)
Response inhibition
Understanding speech in noise
Think about other possibilities
proposing explanations for your results
- What does theory predict we will find?
- How do our results relate to our hypotheses, and those theories?
- Think carefully about WHY you found your results when writing your Discussion (focus on this instead of critiquing methods)
- And this is regardless of whether our initial hypotheses were supported or not
Often, we have already explored relevant psychological theory in our Introduction
Using theory to explain results
- Our explanations do not need to be ‘absolutely correct’ (there is no such thing anyway!), they just need to be plausible and follow evidence
- Remember, we can never ‘prove’ something in psychology (or any science), and we can never say that a hypothesis is ‘correct’ (only that it was supported/not supported by evidence)
- When you read research, make sure you spend time on the Discussion to understand the psychological explanations for the results
Born or made?
Why might an expert in a specific area might exhibit superior cognitive function?
The “deliberate practice” hypothesis (e.g. Keith & Ericsson, 2007)
Performance is the results of effortful and purposeful practice in specific cognitive domains
Results after several years of practice
But what about the other way around?
Beyond born vs. made: A new look at expertise: Hambrick, Macnamara, and Campitelli (2016)
