Expert performance and skill acquisition in professional, occupational, sporting, and academic domains. Use of process tracing
measures (such as verbal reports, motion analyses, eye movements
and other psycho-physiological measures) to uncover the
mechanisms responsible for superior performance. Fundamental issues of
interest include how experts acquire, refine, control or
automate their performance.
My current research is focused on the study of expert performance
and identifying the mechanisms responsible for expert superiority.
This work measures participants' verbal reports of thinking during
representative task performance, typically in a simulated task environment.
Current work involves the assessment of law enforcement officers'
performance when attempting to apprehend a suspect and of critical
care nurses performance during care of ICU patients in a state of
decline. Theoretically, this work has attempted to specify and test
predictions from the theory of Long-term Working Memory and a comprehension-based
view of expertise, and to detail the nature of the representations
and mechanisms used by differentially skilled performers in these
complex tasks. Specifically, I have focused on the experts' ability
to anticipate their opponent, make predictive inferences about the
outcome, and to shape their future actions and interventions based
on their ability to build and update an integrated representation
that describes the current situation. Current work includes attempts
to determine whether expertise can be viewed as the natural end-point
of the normal skill acquisition continuum, where performance becomes
automated and requires minimal attention or effort, or whether experts
maintain control to allow them to flexibly adapt their performance
to situational demands. Ongoing research also examines the deliberate
practice activities of skilled individuals, and high- and low-performing
individuals' learning and their ability to transfer acquired skills
to new tasks or domains. Past research has examined the extent to
which the principles of the expert performance approach can be applied
to train perceptual-cognitive skills, particularly in sport.
Ericsson, K. A., Whyte, J., Ward, P. (2007). Expert
performance in nursing: Reviewing research on expertise within
the framework of the expert-performance approach. Advances in
Nursing Science, 30 (1), E58-E71.
Ward, P., Harris, K. R., Ericsson, K. A., Eccles, D. W., Tashman, L., & Lang, L. (2007). Cognitive basis for expert and superior performance in law enforcement. In D. S. McNamara & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 1884). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Ward, P., & Eccles, D. W. (2006). A commentary on 'Team cognition and expert teams: Emerging insights into learning and performance for exceptional teams'. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 4, 463-483.
Ward, P., Williams, A. M., & Hancock, P. A. (2006). Simulation for performance and training. In K.A. Ericsson, N. Charness, R. Hoffman, and P. Feltovich (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 243-262). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, A.M., Ward, P., Knowles, J., & Smeeton, N. (2002). Anticipation skill in a real-world task: Measurement, training, and transfer in tennis . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8 (4), 259-270.
