Expertise: acquisition, limitations, and control

This chapter reviews the current status of research on expertise, with a tripartite emphasis on expertise acquisition, the limitations associated with expertise, and the extent to which expert skill performance is subject to conscious control. We outline how deliberate practice often enables experts to perform their skills automatically, and we explain the limitations and costs associated with this automaticity. Those limitations include its specificity, brittleness, and limited ability to be transferred to new tasks. Further costs include expediency, mediocrity, and inflexibility. We next discuss whether and in which situations experts are able to exert conscious control over their automatic skills, with the finding that the exertion of control is sometimes at a short-term cost to performance. Finally, we emphasize pragmatic means by which expert performance can be enhanced, either by avoiding known pitfalls or by increasing the level of control that experts can exert over their own behavior.