Recent advances in expertise research: a commentary on the contributions to the special issue

A brief historical background on scientific studies of expert performance describes how the articles published in this special issue relate to recent advances in the study of expertise. This commentary reviews how research on expertise originally focused on testing chess experts' memory as a convenient substitute for studies of actual performance, such as selecting the best move for chess positions. Most of the articles in the special issue illustrate a new trend towards capturing the expert performance with representative tasks in the laboratory and focus on how this superior performance is acquired through training and extended deliberate practice. With these and other advances in our knowledge of how experts acquire their superior skills, the study of expertise is establishing its most important implications for theoretical and applied cognitive psychology.