Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:38:00.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

42 - Modes of Expertise in Creative Thinking: Evidence from Case Studies

from PART VI - GENERALIZABLE MECHANISMS MEDIATING EXPERTISE AND GENERAL ISSUES

Robert W. Weisberg
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Temple University
K. Anders Ericsson
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Neil Charness
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Paul J. Feltovich
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Robert R. Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Get access

Summary

Introduction

The study of expertise has in the last several decades become an area of interest to scholars from a broad range of disciplines. In much of the research literature, expertise is taken to mean consistent superior performance, resulting from deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 1998, Chapter 38). Deliberate practice is the intentional repeated execution, usually under the instruction of a coach, of skills directly relevant to improving the performance in question. The study of expertise can be traced in psychology to de Groot's (1965) study of chess playing, although expertise has been of interest to psychologists since the beginning of scientific psychology (see Shiffrin, 1996, Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, Chapter 4). Examination of the development and functioning of expertise now encompasses a wide range of domains, including medical diagnosis; problem solving in physics; radiologists' skill in reading X-rays; swimming, tennis, soccer, and other athletic domains; performance of classical music; and the perhaps unlikely domain of memory span for digits (see chapters in Ericsson, 1996, and in this volume, especially those in Section V, for representative studies and reviews).

The present chapter examines the question of whether expertise plays a role in creativity, where creativity is defined as the goal-directed production of novelty (Weisberg, 1993). A creative product (an innovation) emerges when an individual intentionally produces something new in attempting to meet some goal (Weisberg, 1993, 1999, 2003). The creative process – or creative thinking – consists of the cognitive processes that play a role in production of innovations.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnason, H. H. (1986). History of modern art. Painting. Sculpture. Architecture. Photography. (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Bassok, M., & Holyoak, K. J. (1989). Interdomain transfer between isomorphic topics in algebra and physics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 153–166.Google Scholar
Calder, A. (1966). Calder. An autobiography with pictures. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). The mind's eye in chess. In Chase, W. G. (Ed.), Visual information processing (pp. 215–281). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chipp, H. B. (1988). Picasso's “Guernica.” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity. Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Groot, A. (1965). Thought and choice in chess. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The acquisition of expert performance: An introduction to some of the issues. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), The road to excellence. The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 1–50). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ericsson, K. A. (1998). The scientific study of expert levels of performance: General implications for optimal learning and creativity. High Ability Studies, 9, 75–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ericsson, K. A. (1999). Creative expertise as superior reproducible performance: Innovative and flexible aspects of expert performance. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 329–333.Google Scholar
Everett, W. (2001). The Beatles as musicians. The Quarry Men through “Rubber Soul.” New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Feltovich, P. J., Spiro, R. R., & Coulson, R. L. (1997). Issues of expert flexibility in contexts characterized by complexity and change. In Feltovich, P. J., Ford, K. M., & Hoffman, R. R. (Eds.), Expertise in context (pp 125–146). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fleck, J. I., & Weisberg, R. W. (2004). The use of verbal protocols as data: An analysis of insight in the candle problem. Memory & Cognition, 32, 990–1006.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friedel, R., & Israel, P. (1986). Edison's electric light. Biography of an invention. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Gardner, H. (1993). Creating minds. An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Hayes, J. R. (1989). Cognitive processes in creativity. In Glover, J. A., Ronning, R. R., & Reynolds, C. R. (Eds.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 135–145). New York: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heppenheimer, T. A. (2003). First flight. The Wright brothers and the invention of the airplane. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
James, W. (1880). Great men, great thoughts, and the environment. Atlantic Monthly, 46, 441–459.Google Scholar
Kozbelt, A. (2004). Reexamining the equal odds rule in classical composers. In Frois, J. P., Andrade, P., & Marques, J. F. (Eds.), Art and science. Proceedings of the XVIII Congress of the International Association of Empirical Esthetics, 540–543. Lisbon, Portugal: IAEA.Google Scholar
Landau, E. (1989). Jackson Pollock. New York: Abrams.Google Scholar
Luchins, A. S., & Luchins, E. H. (1959). Rigidity of behavior. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press.Google Scholar
Marter, J. (1991). Alexander Calder. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Newell, A. (1973). Artificial intelligence and the concept of mind. In Shank, R. C. & Colby, K. M. (Eds.), Computer models of language and thought. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Olby, R. (1994). The path to the double helix. The discovery of DNA. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Pariser, D. (1987). The juvenile drawings of Klee, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso. Visual Arts Research, 13, 53–67.Google Scholar
Perkins, D. N. (1981). The mind's best work. Cambridge, MA: Havard.Google Scholar
Reeves, L. M., & Weisberg, R. W. (1994). Models of analogical transfer in problem solving. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 381–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reising, R. (2002). Every sound there is. The Beatles' “Revolver” and the transformation of rock and roll. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Scheerer, M. (1963). On problem-solving. Scientific American, 208, 118–128.CrossRef
Shiffrin, R. M. (1996). Laboratory experimentation on the genesis of expertise. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), The road to excellence. The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 337–346). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Simonton, D. K. (1999). Origins of genius. Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Sloboda, J. (1996). The acquisition of musical performance expertise: Deconstructing the “talent” account of individual differences in musical expressivity. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), The road to excellence. The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 107–126). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Solomon, M. (1977). Beethoven. New York: Schirmer.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Costs of expertise. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), The road to excellence. The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 347–354). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. (Ed.) (1999). Handbook of creativity. New York: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Watson, J. D. (1968). The double helix: A personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. New York: New American Library.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (1980). Memory, thought, and behavior. New York: Oxford.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius. New York: Freeman.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (1999). Creativity and knowledge: A challenge to theories. In Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.), Handbook of creativity (pp. 226–250). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (2003). Case studies of innovation. In Shavinina, L. (Ed.), International handbook of innovation. New York: Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (2004). On structure in the creative process: A quantitative case-study of the creation of Picasso's Guernica . Empirical Studies in the Arts, 22, 23–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weisberg, R. W. (2006). Creativity: Understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention, and the arts. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W., Buonanno, J. & Israel, P. (2006). Edison and the Electric Light: A Case Study in Technological Creativity. Unpublished manuscript, Temple University.
Weisberg, R. W., & Sturdivant, N. (2006). Career development of classical composers: An examination of the “equal-odds” rule. Unpublished manuscript, Temple University, Philadelphia PA.Google Scholar
Weisberg, R. W., & Suls, J. M. (1973). An information-processing model of Duncker's candle problem. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 255–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winner, E. (1996). The rage to master: The decisive role of talent in the visual arts. In Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.), The road to excellence. The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games (pp. 271–301). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×