Animal Models of Expertise Development

There is a continuing debate in the psychological literature between those who lean more towards learning theories of expertise development and those leaning more towards talent theories. However, the development of human expertise has not been open to direct experimental methods and will probably continue to elude experimentalists in the future. A promising alternative is to employ non-human animal models. Expertise researchers have seemingly overlooked this possibility. However, there are studies in the animal behavior literature that address the development of non-human animal expertise without specifically referring to the topic as expertise. I will discuss two non-human animal examples of expertise development that have been researched by ethologists. Non-human animal expertise development, unlike human expertise development, is subject to direct experimentation. Hence, I recommend initiating expertise research with non-human animals. Sternberg (1999) proposes that intelligence is a type of developing expertise, which if true would indicate the ubiquity of expertise in all human affairs. Skoyles (1999) argues that the environmental demands for the development of expertise were the primary catalysts for the rapid increase in brain size among early homo ancestors. Expertise is, no doubt, an important area of psychological research that is increasingly expanding its horizons. However, human expertise research has been haunted historically by two fundamental problems: first, a functional definition of expertise and second, how expertise is developed. In this paper, I will be addressing the second issue, the development of expertise. There is a continuing debate between those who lean more towards learning theories of expertise development and those leaning more towards innate talent theories. Researchers from both perspectives acknowledge that the other plays some role in expertise development; only straw-men argue that expertise does not require some innately inherited architecture or that expertise can develop without any learning at all. The debate is over the degree to which talent or learning determines the development of expertise. The majority of expertise researchers currently favor a stronger input from learning (Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson & Charness, 1997; Howe, Davidson, & Sloboda, 1998); however, this position is not without critics (Gardner, 1997; Winner, 1996). There appears to be no realistic way to determine the extent to which learning or inherent talent influences human expertise development. Although data has been gathered to support one position or the other, the data has not been decisive. The data is only suggestive because it is correlational in nature. Experiments that truly test competing theories of expertise development, for practical and ethical reasons, cannot be employed with humans. However if we take evolution seriously, then the continuity of species suggests to us a proper means to investigate the issue of expertise development, namely, the employment of non-human animal models. Preliminary Remarks on Expertise Definition of Expertise I will not attempt to provide a solution to the first historical problem of human expertise research, a proper definition of expertise, in this paper. However, for nonhuman animal models to be a viable solution for the problem of expertise development, it must be demonstrated that animals’ performance satisfies the proposed definitions of expertise that are popular in the human literature. Currently, there are two modal definitions of expertise proposed in the human literature: either expertise is the matching of a preset criterion level of performance for a skill, or expertise is being in the top 5% of performers of a skill. Personally, I agree with Wagner and Stanovich (1996) in their belief that defining expertise as exceptional performance, being in the top 5% of performers in a domain, is wrong headed, and that a more proper definition is the matching of a preset criterion-level of performance. Nevertheless, by either definition of expertise, pre-select criterion or top 5% of performers, animals would satisfy the definition on a variety of skills. For example, the top 5% of greyhound track runners, or greyhounds that can run some distance at a pre-select speed. Failure of Human-centered Approaches According to Ericsson (1996), phenomena can be studied via scientific methods when they meet these three criteria: (1) the phenomena occur reliably in clearly specified situations with distinctive observable characteristics, (2) the phenomena should be reproducible under controlled conditions, and (3) the phenomena should