Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps: Where to Look for Inventions and Discoveries During Skilled Performance

Abstract

The framework of plateaus, dips, and leaps shines light on periods when individuals may be inventing new methods of skilled performance. We begin with a review of the role performance plateaus have played in (a) experimental psychology, (b) human-computer interaction, and (c) cognitive science. We then reanalyze two classic studies of individual performance to show plateaus and dips which resulted in performance leaps. For a third study, we show how the statistical methods of Changepoint Analysis plus a few simple heuristics may direct our focus to periods of performance change for individuals. For the researcher, dips become the marker of exploration where performance suffers as new methods are invented and tested. Leaps mark the implementation of a successful new method and an incremental jump above the path plotted by smooth and steady log-log performance increments. The methods developed during these dips and leaps are the key to surpassing one's teachers and acquiring extreme expertise.

Master Maker: Understanding Gaming Skill Through Practice and Habit From Gameplay Behavior

“…It is also intriguing that those who reach a plateau (as evidenced by the SAX patterns in their first 100 matches) only become the best after time away from the game. Such plateaus that are transcended may be evidence of overcoming a suboptimal strategy (see Gray and Lindstedt, in press), which may be further examined in the future by corroborating long‐term skill patterns (like we did for Halo Reach with in‐game analytics, as with StarCraft 2 ).…”

“…This plateau has incited discussion in follow‐up work, where the original authors believed that multiple practice curves existed (Bryan & Harter, ), characterized by the two separate skills of mapping Morse code into letters and predicting words from initial letters. However, Keller counters in a later study that there is no plateau effect (Keller, ), citing unpublished studies by Tulloss, where “there is no sign of a plateau in any of the Tulloss curves.” In many cases, the plateaus may actually be instances of artificial asymptotes due to artifacts or poor system design (Gray & Lindstedt, in press).…”

“…Dips in the first 100 matches only occurred in 14% of top players, compared to dips occurring more than half the time across all players. Since dips can be signals of technique or strategy shifts that eventually improve performance (Gray and Lindstedt, in press; Scarr, Cockburn, Gutwin, & Quinn, ), the lack of dips may suggest that top players already have the habits and innate tools to succeed from the start and do not encounter substantial strategy shifts. This finding provides an orthogonal perspective to the theory of deliberate practice from Ericsson et al.…”

Game‐XP: Action Games as Experimental Paradigms for Cognitive Science

“…Sudnow's work on games seems to have been a one off within the field of Ethnomethodology. However, it has recently been rediscovered by Reeves, Brown, and Laurier (), picked up from that source, and introduced to the Cognitive Science community by Gray and Lindstedt (), with much of its essence being reviewed and discussed in this issue of topiCS by Reeves, Greiffenhagen, and Laurier ().…”

Effects of 30 Years of Disuse on Exceptional Memory Performance

“…According to the framework, when individuals escape from plateaus of performance, it would be possible to observe two behavioral events: dips and leaps. In particular, it appears that DD experienced dips for the first time when he initially reached around 20 digits during the original training (Gray & Lindstedt, 2016) as DD struggled to recall the lists of 20-25 digits in this study. Using the framework, Gray and Lindstedt (2016) explained how SF and DD acquired an exceptional level of digit-span, pointing out several dips and leaps in their performance curves.…”