Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

enhancing hormone erythropoietin, and basketball players may seek artificial height
increases! Fortunately for legislators and sports associations, this type of genetic therapy
for athletes is not a feasible proposition at present.
In summary, despite its intuitive plausibility, the hardware approach is inadequate for
the task of explaining the theoretical mechanisms which underlie athletic expertise. But
what about the software approach? Can research on expert-novice differences in
cognitive processes help us to understand the nature of athletic expertise?

Expert-novice differences in sport: research methods and findings

Since the pioneering research of de Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973) on the
cognitive characteristics of chess grand-masters, cognitive psychology researchers have
used laboratory simulations of various real-life tasks in order to determine how expert
performers differ from novices. Initially, the main fields of expertise investigated were
formal knowledge domains such as chess and physics where problem-solving processes
and outcomes can be measured objectively. The archetypal research in this regard was a
set of studies conducted by de Groot (1965) on chess expertise.
In one of these experiments, de Groot, who was a chess master player, explored how
performers of different abilities planned their moves. Briefly, he found that the grand-
masters made better moves than less skilled experts—even though they did not appear to
consider more moves than the latter players. Some years later, Chase and Simon (1973)
discovered that although chess experts were superior to novices in recalling the positions
of chess pieces from real or meaningful games, they did not differ from this group in their
memory for chess pieces that had been randomly scattered around the board. The
evidence for this conclusion came from two key findings. First, whereas chess masters
could recall, on average, about sixteen of the twenty-four chess pieces displayed on the
board in their correct positions after a single five-second glance, novices could recall only
about four such pieces correctly. Second, when the chess pieces were presented in
random or meaningless configurations on the board, the experts were no better than the
novices at recalling their positions correctly. Indeed, neither group could recall more than
two or three chess pieces in their correct location. This classic study shows that expert
chess players do not have superior memories to those of novices—but that they use their
more extensive knowledge base to “chunk” or code the chess configurations in
meaningful ways. Another conclusion from this study is that the cognitive superiority of
expert chess players over novices is knowledge-based and context-specific—not
indicative of some general intellectual advantage. In the light of this finding, research on
expertise since the 1990s has shifted away from formal knowledge domains (such as
chess) towards informal, everyday skills such as sport, music and dance (Starkes et al.,
2001).

Research methods in the study of expertise

Within the domain of sport, a variety of research methods have been used to study expert-
novice differences. These methods include both qualitative techniques (such as in-depth
interviews and “think aloud” verbal protocols) and quantitative procedures (e.g., pattern

What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 161