Drawing on a Sculpted Space of Actions: Educating for Expertise while Avoiding a Cognitive Monster

Avoiding a Cognitive Monster
Although expertise is usually considered as a positive outcome of education and practice in domains as varied as sports, science, music and politics, there are also concerns about negative effects of expertise. Since expertise is facilitated largely by implicit, automatic cognitive and brain processes, it can also lead to undesirable consequences in the form of stereotypical, discriminatory or inflexible responses. Indeed, such responses can at times even be inconsistent with the explicit and intentional choices of an expert. Explaining this phenomenon, it is argued that an expert’s performance can be considered as selecting in a given situation a preferred option for action from a ‘Sculpted Space of Actions’ (Keestra, 2014), which contains more, more complex and better differentiated action representations than a beginner’s space of actions. Integrating this account with the cognitive neuroscientific theory of Predictive Processing, it is argued how mitigating undesirable effects of expertise depends upon awareness and control of the processes involved. Education should therefore provide for insights in and techniques for controlling the cognitive and brain processes that constitute expertise.