Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

Using a combination of the four preceding methods, a number of expert-novice
differences in sport have been identified in recent years (see review by Starkes et al.,
2001). These findings may be summarised as follows.

Research findings on expert-novice differences in athletes

The following research findings summarise what is known about the differences between
expert and novice athletes at present. For a more detailed discussion of these five
research trends, see Lavallee, Kremer, Moran and Williams (2004), Starkes and Ericsson
(2003), Starkes, Helsen and Jack (2001), A.M.Williams et al. (1999) and A.M.Williams
(2002b).

Experts have a more extensive knowledge-base of sport-specific

information

To begin with, expert athletes and coaches know more about their specialist domain than
do relative novices but as we shall see later, this knowledge tends to be “domain specific”
or restricted to one specific field. In the case of chess masters, the size of this chess
database or “vocabulary” has been estimated at approximately 50,000 “chunks” of
information (Simon and Gilmartin, 1973), where a chunk is defined as a meaningful
grouping of chess piece positions.
This quantitative advantage associated with expertise means that experienced athletes
and coaches possess a larger and better cross-referenced knowledge-base about their
chosen sport than do relative novices. Typically, this cognitive superiority is evident in
three different areas: declarative knowledge (i.e., factual knowledge about the sport in
question such as knowing its rules), procedural knowledge (i.e., the ability to perform
basic technical skills in this sport accurately and efficiently) and strategic knowledge
(i.e., the ability to recognise and respond optimally to various patterns of play in the
sport). Thus Morris, Tweedy and Gruneberg (1985) found that people who knew a lot
about soccer displayed significantly greater recall of match results than did less
knowledgeable participants. Also, Hyllegard (1991) discovered that expert batters were
better than novices in predicting the type of pitch they were about to receive in a
simulated baseball situation. Finally, Abernethy, Neal and Koning (1994) found that
expert snooker players were more adept than novices at planning future shots.

Experts use their knowledge more efficiently to identify, remember and

manipulate relevant information

Apart from knowing more about their specialist sport than novices, expert athletes can do
more with information deemed relevant. For example, Chase and Simon (1973)
discovered that top chess players were better than novices at encoding and recalling
meaningful (but not random) patterns from actual game situations. This cognitive
advantage of experts over novices has been replicated extensively in sport situations.
Thus top athletes and coaches are adept at recognising and memorising patterns of play in
their sport. For example, Bedon and Howard (1992) found that expert karate practitioners
were significantly superior to beginners in memorising various strategic techniques which

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 168