Chapter 3 - Mental Representations 

Studies

• The more accomplished soccer players were much better at deciding what the player with the ball should do in the future, and they had a better memory for where the relevant players were located and in what direction they were moving
• Highly successful insurance sales agents had much more complex and integrated mental representations so they could figure out what to do more quickly and more accurately in any given situation

Key Terms

• Mental representation: a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else concrete or abstract that the brain is thinking about
• Mental representations: preexisting patterns of information that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations
• Aural representation: a clear idea of what a piece should sound like

General Information

• Highly developed mental processes are seen in expert performers in every field
• The memory of chess masters is very context-dependent since it is only for patterns of the sort that would appear in a normal game
• The amount of time spent on studying games played by masters is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability
• For chess masters, the patterns of chess pieces are held in long-term memory in chunks, which are organized hierarchically
• Mental representations allow chess masters to get an immediate sense of which side has the advantage, which directions the game might take, and what a good move or moves might be
• Deliberate practice involves developing more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing
• Mental representations are vert “domain specific” so that they apply yo only the skill for which they are developed
• Mental representations make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly
• Without mental representations, we couldn’t talk, walk or live any sort of human life
• Expert performers develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields
• The years of practice of experts have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations
• Effective mental representations allow a quarterback to make good decisions quickly
• Experienced climbers automatically identify each hold accordingly to the type of grip it requires, and their brains send a signal to their hands preparing them to form the corresponding grip
• The key factor in determining a person’s comprehension of a story about football or baseball game is how much that person already understands about the sport
• The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information
• A doctor diagnosing a patient with a complex set of symptoms must use his/her mental representations
• Expert diagnosticians have built sophisticated mental representations that let them consider a number of different facts at once
• Expert diagnosticians tend to see symptoms and other relevant data as pieces of larger patterns
• Surgeons often visualize an entire surgery before making the 1st incision
• Expert performers monitor and evaluate their performance, and when necessary, they modify their mental representations to make them more effective
• Advanced musicians have a very detailed mental representation of the music they use to guide their practice and provide their own feedback
• The more accomplished music students were better able to determine when they had made mistakes and to identify difficult sections they needed to focus more on
• The relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle because the more skilled you are, the better your mental representations are