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Thinking Outside The Box: The Role of Environmental Adaptation in The Acquisition of Skilled and Expert Performance

Expert orienteers are able to reduce their cognitive workload during competitions by strategically adapting their navigational equipment. They implement solutions such as folding maps to reduce visual search time, attaching control description cards to their sleeves to integrate information sources more closely, and annotating cards and resetting maps to decrease mental rotation needs. By manipulating navigational information in the environment rather than in their minds, expert orienteers can circumvent natural processing limitations.

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Addison Born
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38 views23 pages

Thinking Outside The Box: The Role of Environmental Adaptation in The Acquisition of Skilled and Expert Performance

Expert orienteers are able to reduce their cognitive workload during competitions by strategically adapting their navigational equipment. They implement solutions such as folding maps to reduce visual search time, attaching control description cards to their sleeves to integrate information sources more closely, and annotating cards and resetting maps to decrease mental rotation needs. By manipulating navigational information in the environment rather than in their minds, expert orienteers can circumvent natural processing limitations.

Uploaded by

Addison Born
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Thinking Outside the Box

The Role of Environmental Adaptation in the Acquisition of Skilled and Expert Performance
Expert Performance

• Theories

• Experts gain advantage by acquiring through practice cognitive skills and


strategies that increase the efficiency which information specific to their domain is
processed.

• Experts are able to circumvent natural processing limits


What?
Ok.

• Experts use strategies to adapt physical elements of their domain environment to


reduce cognitive workload during performance to bypass natural processing
limitations.
In a nutshell

• Experts are able to process more and put their brain through less work because they
use strategies to simply the input.
Expert Performance

• What is it?

• A greater ability to “percieve, attend, encode, store, and recall information”

• Experts get better because they have spent more time using these particular
strategies

• “Preparation” like this increases domain-specific knowledge and leads to rapid


and flexible memorization during performance

• Experts are highly efficient

• Rapid and flexible memorization of and access to that knowledge during


performance
We know this…how?

• Previous studies
• Numerous show athletes developing cognitive skills and strategies to circumvent
natural processing limitations and faster orienteering.
• Eccles, Walsh, Ingledew (2006)
• Expert and inexperienced orienteers were able to attend to navigational
equipment while doing other activities, but only experienced orienteers were
able to do so with proficiency and less need to stop and do one at a time.
• New findings
• Some strategies allow experts to adapt physical elements of their domain
environment to reduce cognitive workload during performance.
• Instead of manipulating information in the brain, experts manipulate information in
the world. (Wilson 2002)
How do we use this stuff?

• Skilled jigsaw puzzlers group pieces together by color and shape and thereby reduce
the amount of time required to search for pieces.

• Dieters use geometric shapes to discern portion size rather than do calculations in their
head.
What’s Orienteering?

• Orienteering is a family of sports which combine navigation with a specific method of


travel.

• Because the method of travel determines the needed equipment and tactics, each sport
requires specific rules for competition and guidelines for orienteering event logistics
and course design.
Compass

Control Description

Map
The Big Question

• How do expert orienteers adapt their navigational equipment to reduce cognitive


workload during orienteering performance?
Study Method

• 15 experts
• 6-24 years of experience orienteering

• 6 experienced coaches
• 5-22 years of coaching experience, 24-38 years of orienteering experience
Qualitative Interview

• Phase 1
• General Intro
• Demographic Info

• Phase 2
• Can you tell me what navigational equipment you cary and how you arrange it for
use when orienteering?
• Elaboration

• Phase 3
• A more specific question toward how the arrangement of each equipment item
mentioned in phase 2 affected cognitive workload; recall of specific experiences
Content Analysis

• A mix of deductive and inductive reasoning.

• Concepts built directly from the data


Results
The Big Answer

• Expert orienteers make use of strategies that involve adapting their navigational
equipment to reduce cognitive workload and attentional workload
Findings

• Findings support results from other cognitive workload tests

• Display-Size Effect

• Featural singleton

• Proximity Compatibility Principle

• Display-based problem solving

• Reducing Mental Rotation


Display - Size Effect

• As the number of items within a visual display increases, the amount of visual search
time required also increases
• Orienteer Solution- Fold the map
Featural Selection

• An item that is easily located because it is perceptually distinguishable on one or more


dimensions
• Orienteer Solution - Thumb the map
Proximity Compatibility Principle

• Processing proximity dictates perceptual proximity dictate the spatial proximity of the
display of those sources (integrating two or more sources mentally should effect the
closeness of its visual display of the sources)
• Orienteer Solution - Attaching description card to sleeve
Display-Based Problem Solving

• Altering an external representation such that it is simpler to process but yields the
same information
• Orienteer Solution - Annotating the control description card
Reducing Mental Rotation

• Physically rotate an image until it visually matches the real world


• Orienteer solution - Setting and resetting the map
Implications

• Expert orienteers can work around limits on attentional resources by


implementing strategies that change the way information displayed by the
navigational equipment is processed

• Changing the way that task-relevant information is arranged in the


environment is another way to circumvent processing limitations

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