22.+Intelligence+and+Expertise

May 8, 2015
 * 21. Intelligence and Expertise**

The secret of success Intelligence Expertise
 * Outline**
 * How much does it matter
 * What process underlies it?
 * Is it genetic?
 * Can you train it?
 * Plateaus
 * Deliberate practice

Rough definitions: How would you test if IQ tests measure intelligence? Are IQ tests perfect? Is there more to success than intelligence? Do IQ tests measure intelligence? How important is intelligence? These correlations are incredible
 * How much does intelligence matter?**
 * Your intelligence is how good you are at thinking
 * Your IQ is a number that you get after taking a test
 * Predictive validity:
 * Do IQ tests predict performance on tasks that require intelligence?
 * IQ scores are correlated with:
 * Divorce
 * Unemployment
 * Incarceration
 * Highway death rates
 * etc.
 * No.
 * Yes.
 * Yes, amazingly well.
 * Very important, apparently
 * The correlation between job performance and:
 * IQ is about .50
 * EQ (emotional intelligence) is about .01

Working memory
 * Processes underlying intelligence**
 * a very basic cognitive function that generalizes across all tasks
 * Ability to actively process information
 * Extremely useful for thinking
 * Measured by operation span task
 * Word span task measures rote repetition
 * Correlated with intelligence

Correlation between IQ scores when they come from... There is clear evidence that IQ is influenced by
 * Is intelligence genetic?**
 * Identical twins: .86
 * Identical twins raised apart: .78
 * The same person measured twice: .80
 * Genes
 * Environment

Crystallized intelligence Fluid intelligence IQ is changing over time IQ is affected by environment
 * Can intelligence be trained?**
 * How much you know
 * How smart you are
 * Flynn effect: Intelligence has increased steadily for decades. IQ scores remain the same because the tests are adjusted to be harder
 * School, etc., enhances IQ
 * IQ gains due to school are short lived if the environment is removed

The Mozart Effect
 * Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky (1993)
 * Listening to Mozart increased spatial reasoning in an IQ test
 * In college students
 * Benefit lasted for 15 minutes
 * Only for people who liked Mozart
 * Listening to Stephen King has the same effect. "Enjoyment arousal"
 * Mozart Effect for babies, Baby Einstein, Lumosity claim to increase intelligence, but they don't

Jaeggi et al. (2008): Claimed that brain training improves fluid intelligence outside the lab Redick et al. (2013): Replicated Jaeggi et al. (i.e., did the same study)
 * Participants believed it had worked
 * But there was no benefit outside lab tasks

Brain training makes you better at the task you were trained on. There is no convincing evidence that working memory training works beyond the lab.


 * Expertise**

What is an expert? Choudhry et al. (2005): Henry et al. (2012): Examined high school teachers in their first 5 years of teaching
 * Experts as high performers
 * An individual who demonstrates excellent performance in the domain under investigation
 * Experts as outlier
 * If you're more than 2 SD above average, maybe you're an expert
 * Reviewed 62 published articles examining the relationship between:
 * The quality of care provided by physicians
 * Their years of experience
 * Experienced doctors did not necessarily provide higher quality care
 * Do teachers get better with experience?
 * Yes while they're facing new challenges
 * Not after it's all familiar


 * Deliberate Practice**
 * You have to know what you're not good at
 * It has to be something __specific__
 * You have to work at what you're not good at
 * You have to focus on that thing. You have to concentrate
 * (It's not fun. Although it can be rewarding)
 * It has to be appropriately challenging
 * If you're doing something you find easy, you might not be improving
 * If you're doing something too hard, you might be practicing doing it wrong (this is why Prof. Kornell sucks at guitar)
 * You have to have direct feedback on your learning/performance
 * It has to be specific; if you have 5 changes and you get better, which one(s) helped?
 * You have to stay motivated
 * It's not fun to practice what you're bad at
 * It's not fun to be criticized

Grape et al. (2003) Scrabble Duke, Simmons, & Cash (2009) Spartak is a tennis club in Moscow
 * Examined singers when they were practicing
 * Amateurs
 * Report enjoyment, say singing is a release
 * Professionals
 * Do not report enjoyment, focus on technique
 * "Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hours a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary"
 * You don't get good at Scrabble by just playing
 * Memorizing words isn't fun.
 * Investigated the importance of errors
 * 17 advanced piano majors practiced a Shostakovich concerto
 * Told to practice until they were ready to play the passage the following day
 * Performance was not affected by total practice time or total number of total practice trials
 * "The most notable differences...related to their handling of errors"
 * Everyone started out making errors... "But when errors occurred, the top-ranked pianists seemed much better able to correct them..."


 * The children there practice technique for hours.
 * Every mistake is identified and corrected.
 * They hardly ever play tennis.
 * They aren’t allowed to play a tournament for the first 3 years.
 * They've produced some amazing players

Summary
 * Doing something isn't the same as practicing
 * Practicing means working on your weaknesses and trying to improve
 * If you're having fun, you might not be learning much

What's the secret to success?
 * Don't stop learning!