Experts Perceive Differently

It's not just that the expert actively thinks about things differently from the novice. It's that the expert literally perceives them differently to begin with.

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An important mechanism behind expert performance is “perceptual learning,” the ability to extract key features from complex environments while filtering out irrelevant noise.

Whereas a beginner perceives individual isolated pieces of information, an expert perceives “chunks” of information organized into meaningful patterns and structures. These chunks are physically encoded as wiring in the expert’s long-term memory, and they are the building blocks that make up the expert’s representation of what they’re looking at in working memory.

This is the critical point: it’s not just that the expert actively thinks about things differently from the novice. It’s that the expert literally perceives them differently to begin with. The same sensory signals are processed into different working memory representations. What the expert holds in working memory is very different from what the novice holds in working memory.

What’s more, these memory representations in the expert brain can also include predictive information that’s not in the original stimulus. The stimulus activates a neural representation, and that neural representation may contain more information than is in the stimulus. It may include missing details or even future events associated with the stimulus. The expert will perceive all of this additional information while perceiving the stimulus, and they can use this information to make better decisions and sense/correct mistakes before they fully manifest.

For instance, consider an expert pianist. Without even pressing the keys of the piano, they can predict what sounds will be made purely based on hand position. If the hand position is wrong, they can quickly detect and correct the issue to avoid playing a wrong note. A beginner, on the other hand, will not realize that there is an issue until they hear the wrong note.

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