The role of creativity in expertise and skilled action

Abstract

Perhaps a part of what makes expertise so inspiring to the curious researcher is the possibility of appropriating the structural components of skilled action to draw a roadmap towards their achievement that anyone might be able to follow. Accordingly, the purpose of this essay is to shed light upon the role that creativity plays in the production and environment of skilled action to that foregoing end. In doing so, I suggest that the lessons to be learned from recent empirical research on creativity has much to offer to the cognitive science of skill and expertise. Experts are able to bring their intelligence to bear in controlling fast and seemingly automatic actions by utilizing a form of control often called 'intelligent automaticity.' In this spirit, I argue that the environment of intelligently automatic action control curates a similarly ideal environment for the processes of creativity. Moreover, insofar as creativity is ideally operative within the environment of expert action control, I argue further that creativity functions as one representative form of 'intelligence' embedded within otherwise fluid, and automatic expert actions. Creativity is able to do so even without conscious representation through the powers of incubated cognition.

Documenting and analyzing pre-reflective self-consciousness underlying ongoing performance optimization in elite athletes. The theoretical and methodological approach of the course-of-experience framework

“…Indeed, the stance adopted by Toner, Montero and Moran (2021) is that an expert's ability to execute complex skills under demanding conditions requires embodied skills, conscious awareness of bodily movements and reflective practice. This position is very close to those of diverse authors in the cognitive science domain of skilled action (e.g., Christensen et al 2016;Ivy 2022), suggesting that "skilled performances are those in which automatic and intelligent action controls are able to work together in an expert's successful performance" (Ivy 2022, 1). Toner and Moran put forward what they called "hybrid theories of skilled action" (2021,577).…”

“…From this viewpoint, intelligent skillful actions suppose "the close integration between fine-grained automatic motor routines and intentional states" (Toner and Moran 2021, 577) to be fluid, flexible and highly adaptive to the situation's uncertainty and dynamism. For Ivy (2022), automatic action controls can be considered as intelligent when they are appropriately sensitive to higher-order intentions and executive commands. Moreover, these controls require a sense of agency in the athlete's experience (i.e., the experience of a skilled agent) (Ivy 2022).…”

“…For Ivy (2022), automatic action controls can be considered as intelligent when they are appropriately sensitive to higher-order intentions and executive commands. Moreover, these controls require a sense of agency in the athlete's experience (i.e., the experience of a skilled agent) (Ivy 2022). The position here is that the achievement of high performance is accompanied by an experience lived by the athlete as their own experience, i.e., a pre-reflective self-consciousness of the athlete's own intentions, expectations, focus of attention, perceptions, domain-specific knowledge mobilization and/or construction, that accompany their ongoing action at every moment.…”

Unconscious Intelligence in the Skilled Control of Expert Action

“…As Mylopoulos (2020) says of these forms of action: "Motor mechanisms flexibly adapt to ongoing changes in the environment in a way that does not conform to a pattern of brute reflexes." In these forms of skilled action there is a sensitivity within automatic performance to an expert's ideals for how to perform well (Papineau, 2013;Riggle & Hopkins, 2021;Ivy, 2022), to their goals (Marien et. al., 2012), and to their skills which have been deliberately trained through time (Runswick et.…”

“…To the contrary, a new form of sophisticated hybrid modelone that champions the addition of intelligently automatic action control in our understanding of expertise fills in the gap left incomplete by the traditionally dichotomous models. Thus, what makes these new hybrid models sophisticated is that they reject the idea that intelligence and automaticity come at the mutual exclusion of one another in skilled action control (Fridland, 2015;Levy, 2017;Shepherd, 2017;Christensen, 2016Christensen, , 2021Mylopoulos, 2020;Pacherie & Mylopoulos, 2021;Ivy, 2022, just to name a few).…”