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The Neuroscience of Expertise
The Neuroscience of Expertise examines the ways in which the brain accom-
modates the incredible feats of experts. It builds on a tradition of cognitive
research to explain how the processes of perception, attention, and memory
come together to enable experts’ outstanding performance. The text explains
how the brain adapts to enable the complex cognitive machinery behind ex-
pertise, and provides a unifying framework to illuminate the seemingly un-
connected performance of experts in different domains. Whether it is a radi-
ologist who must spot a pathology in a split second, a chess grandmaster who
finds the right path in a jungle of possible continuations, or a tennis profes-
sional who reacts impossibly quickly to return a serve, The Neuroscience of
Expertise offers insight into the universal cognitive and neural mechanisms
behind these achievements.
Merim Bilalić is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of

Northumbria at Newcastle and the University of Klagenfurt. He received his
DPhil in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University, and has subse-
quently held research and teaching positions at Humboldt University Berlin,
Brunel University, and Tübingen University. His research on problem-solving
biases in experts won the Award for the Outstanding Doctoral Research
Contribution to Psychology from the British Psychological Society in 2008.
Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology
Developed in response to a growing need to make neuroscience accessible
to students and other non-specialist readers, the Cambridge Fundamen-
tals of Neuroscience in Psychology series provides brief introductions to
key areas of neuroscience research across major domains of psychology.
Written by experts in cognitive, social, affective, developmental, clinical,
and applied neuroscience, these books will serve as ideal primers for stu-
dents and other readers seeking an entry point to the challenging world
of neuroscience.
Forthcoming Titles in the Series

The Neuroscience of Intelligence, by Richard J. Haier
The Neuroscience of Adolescence, by Adriana Galván
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory, by Scott D. Slotnick
The Neuroscience of Aging, by Angela Gutchess
The Neuroscience of Addiction, by Francesca Filbey

The Neuroscience of
Expertise
Merim Bilalić
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
University of Klagenfurt

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107084599
DOI: 10.1017/9781316026847
© Merim Bilalić 2017
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2017
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-107-08459-9 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-44651-9 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

To Esther

Contents
Preface page xi
List of Abbreviations xv
1 Introduction to Research on Expertise 1

1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Definition of Expertise and Its Domains 2
1.3 Cognitive Mechanisms in Expertise 5
1.3.1 Perceptual and Cognitive Expertise 7
1.3.2 Motor Expertise 13
1.4 How the Brain Accommodates Expertise 15
1.4.1 Neuroimaging Techniques 15
1.4.2 Organism Adaptability 16
1.4.3 Functional and Structural Reorganization 19
1.4.4 Neural Implementation of Perceptual and
Cognitive Expertise 21
1.4.5 Neural Implementation of Motor Expertise 24
1.5 Expertise as a Research Vehicle in Cognitive Neuroscience 27
1.6 Conclusion 30
2 Perceptual Expertise 34
2.1 Introduction 34
2.2 Anatomy of the Perceptual System 35
2.2.1 Visual System 37
2.2.2 Auditory System 39
2.2.3 Tactile System 41
2.2.4 Gustatory and Olfactory Systems 41
2.3 Adaptability of the Perceptual System 42
2.4 Visual Expertise 45
2.4.1 Face Perception 45
2.4.1.1 Holistic Processing in Face Perception 46
2.4.1.2 Individual Differences in Face Perception 49
2.4.1.3 Neural Implementation of Face Perception 51
2.4.1.4 Are Faces Unique? 56
2.4.1.5 The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) as a Brain
Module 57

viii Contents
2.4.2 Radiological Expertise 58

2.4.2.1 Cognitive Mechanisms in Radiological
Expertise 62
2.4.2.2 Neural Implementation of Radiological
Expertise 65
2.4.3 Fingerprint Expertise 71
2.4.4 Musical Notation 74
2.5 Auditory Expertise 77
2.5.1 Absolute Pitch (AP) and Its Neuronal
Implementation 77
2.5.2 Anatomy of AP 80
2.5.3 Complex Musical Aspects and Their Neural
Implementation 82
2.6 Tactile Expertise 83
2.7 Gustative Expertise 85
2.8 Olfactory Expertise 91
2.9 Conclusion 95
3 Cognitive Expertise 100

3.1 Introduction 100
3.2 Memory Systems and Their Neural Basis 102
3.3 Memory Expertise (Superior Memory) 105
3.3.1 Natural Memorizers 106
3.3.2 Strategic Memorizers 107
3.3.3 Memory Training 109
3.3.4 Skilled Memory and Long-Term Working Memory 111
3.3.5 Neural Basis of Expert Memorizers 114
3.3.5.1 Expert Memorizers – Functional
Implementation 114
3.3.5.2 Expert Memorizers – Structural
Characteristics 117
3.3.5.3 Expert Memorizers – Training Studies 118
3.4 Calculation Expertise 120
3.4.1 Mental Calculators 122
3.4.2 Abacus Calculators 126
3.4.3 Summary 135
3.5 Expertise in Board Games 136
3.5.1 The Beginning of the Scientific Study of Expertise 136
3.5.2 Knowledge Structures in Expertise 139

Contents ix
3.5.3 Memory and Problem Solving in Expertise 141

3.5.4 Theories of Expertise 144
3.5.5 Neural Implementation of (Board) Expertise 145
3.5.5.1 Skilled Object Recognition 146
3.5.5.2 Pattern Recognition 149
3.5.5.3 Problem Solving 154
3.5.5.4 Anatomical Changes 158
3.6 Spatial Expertise 160
3.6.1 Cognitive Mechanisms in Spatial Expertise 161
3.6.2 Neural Implementation and Anatomical
Changes in Spatial Expertise 162
3.7 Conclusion 165
4 Motor Expertise 170

4.2 Anatomy of the Motor System 171
4.2.1 Cortical Motor System 172
4.2.2 Subcortical Motor System 175
4.3 Adaptability of the Motor System 177
4.4 Simple Motor Tasks (Skill Acquisition) 178
4.4.1 Structural Changes in the Motor System
During Skill Acquisition 178
4.4.2 Functional Changes in the Motor System
During Skill Acquisition 183
4.5 Motor Expertise 186
4.5.1 Structural Changes in Motor System in Expertise 186
4.6 Music (Motor) Expertise 188
4.6.1 Cross-Sectional Studies 189
4.7 Cognitive Component in Motor Expertise 192
4.7.1 Early Investigations on Motor Expertise 193
4.7.2 The Role of Memory in Motor Expertise 195
4.7.3 Decision Making in Motor Expertise 197
4.7.4 Occlusion Paradigm 201
4.8 Neural Implementation of Motor Expertise 204
4.8.1 Mirror Neurons in Motor Expertise 207
4.8.2 Action Observation Network (AON) in Sports 212
4.8.3 Temporal Occlusion and AON in Motor Expertise 215
4.8.4 Deception and the AON in Motor Expertise 217
4.9 Conclusion 220

x Contents
5 The Road to Expertise 223

5.2 Different Experts, Same Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms 225
5.2.1 Double Take of Expertise 227
5.3 Different Approaches in Expertise Research 228
5.3.1 Expertise, Training and Aging 229
5.3.2 Functional Changes Related to Expertise and Aging 231
5.3.3 Structural Changes Related to Expertise and Aging 232
5.4 The Road to Expertise 234
5.4.1 Practice and Individual Differences 234
5.5 Nature Versus Nurture in Neuroscience 238
5.5.1 Tactile Ability 238
5.5.2 Spatial Navigation – Taxi Driving 240
5.5.3 Music Ability 241
5.6 Deliberate Practice 243
5.6.1 Deliberate Practice Versus Talent 247
5.7 Conclusion 248
Key Terms 252

References 264
Index 289
Color plates are to be found between pp. 144 and 145

Preface
When was the last time you were left scratching your head struggling to
come to grips with what you had just seen? A good bet would be that you
were witnessing an amazing performance by one of the very best per-
formers in his or her field. You do not even have to witness Adele hitting
note after note perfectly; or the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen,
who, blindfolded, plays a dozen opponents simultaneously and demolish-
es them; or the incredible Serena Williams, who continues to win Grand
Slam tennis tournaments at such a rate that her current number of singles
titles (21) will probably have increased by the time this book reaches the
shelves. There is a good chance that if you go to a local music school, or a
local chess or tennis club, you will find other people so exceptional at their
craft that, watching them, you would be forgiven for thinking that some
kind of trick or magic is involved. This book is devoted to these experts
and the way their brain accommodates their exceptional performance.
Expertise is a fascinating topic because, among other reasons, under-
standing the ways in which experts achieve their incredible feats would
satisfy our curiosity. However, it would also help us prepare better train-
ing programs for future experts, a necessity in today’s world where al-
most any position requires extensive specialization and a developed set
of skills. It is thus no wonder that the scientific study of expertise is as old
as the science of psychology itself. These days, expertise is an established
topic in psychology and a constituent part of any curriculum or textbook
in cognitive psychology. In 2017 alone, three big handbooks on expertise
are scheduled to appear. Yet, in a century marked by technical advances
and the rise of neuroscientific research, this is the first book on the neu-
roscience of expertise, to the best of my knowledge.
Just like many other cognitive psychologists, I am excited by the wide
availability of neuroimaging devices and recent technical advances in
neuroscience. Neuroimaging techniques present an exciting way to ob-
tain new insight into complex topics, such as expertise. They are, how-
ever, not a magic bullet, nor will they suddenly provide the answers that
we have been seeking for more than a hundred years. It is unlikely that
they will make the previous behavioral research redundant. I am a firm
believer that in order to understand how something works, especially
something as complex as experts’ performance, one needs to draw from
various sources of information. Neuroimaging data are too valuable to

xii Preface
pass by, and, as it happens, the traditional cognitive approach and the
new neuroimaging techniques complement each other particularly well.
The book exemplifies why understanding the cognitive processes be-
hind a phenomenon becomes crucial for understanding how the brain ac-
commodates that phenomenon. The Neuroscience of Expertise builds on
the traditional expertise research that demonstrates how basic cognitive
processes, such as memory, attention, and perception, come together to en-
able experts’ outstanding performance. You will understand why some ath-
letes appear to have all the time in the world in domains where everything
changes and moves quickly, why chess grandmasters can foresee the future
without really looking more than a couple of moves ahead, and why ra-
diologists need just a split second to realize that something is amiss in a
radiological image. I can immediately disappoint readers who are hoping
to find out that experts are somehow differently hard-wired. The cognitive
capacities of experts, just like those of the rest of us, are limited. There are
no superpowers and there are no supernatural shortcuts to becoming an
expert. But the beauty of expertise lies exactly in the way that experts nev-
ertheless circumvent their limited cognition to pull off their amazing feats.
The end product of expertise may look mesmerizingly simple, even effort-
less, but the process requires a complex interplay between basic cognitive
processes to make it work. That our brain is able to accommodate such
complex machinery is a testament to its incredible adaptability.
The connection between the cognitive processes behind expertise and
the way expertise is implemented in the brain is the overarching theme in
the book. Expertise comes in many forms and guises but the basic princi-
ples are the same whether we talk about radiology, chess, or tennis. I have
organized the book around these three domains because they mirror how
we act in everyday life – usually perceiving the world (perception) and
making sense of it (cognition), which precede acting on the environment
(motor). Radiology is typical of perceptual expertise, the kind of exper-
tise where we predominantly rely on our senses. Beside radiologists, in
Chapter 2 I will examine a number of other perceptual experts, from
sommeliers and perfumers to blind people who have well-developed
tactile skills. Perception plays a role in chess, but to be good at it one
also requires the ability to imagine and hold various possible strategies in
one’s mind. Chapter 3 is on cognitive expertise and features game board
experts, exceptional memorizers, outstanding calculators, and taxi driv-
ers. The next chapter, Chapter 4, examines motor expertise and includes
experts in sports, music, and other fields involving movement, such as
dance. These three chapters are preceded by the introductory first chap-
ter, which defines experts and expertise, positions the field of expertise

Preface xiii
in the wider context of cognitive neuroscience, and lays down the main
principles behind the cognitive mechanisms behind expertise and the
way the brain accommodates them. These principles will then be em-
ployed and expanded on throughout the rest of the book. In the fifth and
final chapter, I not only summarize the common themes in the book, but
also tackle a number of advanced topics, such as expertise and aging. A
good part of the closing chapter, however, is devoted to examining what
it takes to become an expert.
I wrote the book with undergraduate students in mind, who need a
simple introduction to complex topics. This is particularly the case with
cognitive and neuroscience topics, which are populated by numerous dis-
jointed theories that make it difficult for students to grasp the essence
of the work. I took great care to introduce basic concepts early in the
chapter, explain them in simple terms, and only then to connect them
with more advanced topics later in the chapter. These key terms have
been highlighted when they are first mentioned in each chapter and have
been collected in a glossary at the end of the book. Each chapter starts
with a list of learning objectives and then introduces the main topics in
the text. The main text also provides an overview of the brain’s anatom-
ical and functional properties, which is necessary for the understanding
of the neural processes behind expertise. The major studies and the most
important concepts have been illustrated with figures, some of them in
color in the color plates situated in the middle of the book. The core ideas
are then summarized and review questions, together with a list of recom-
mended literature for further reading, have been provided at the end of
the chapter. The book has a uniform feel not only because of this con-
sistent chapter structure, but also because of the integrating framework
it uses throughout the book – the connection between the cognitive pro-
cesses behind expertise and the way they are accommodated in the brain.
Nevertheless, the book is modular in nature and each chapter can be
read and taught separately. Repeating key terms from previous chapters
and defining them anew is inevitable. I took great care, however, in add-
ing only the necessary details at the beginning and then expanding them
in the other chapters. For example, the term chunking, one of the central
concepts in expertise, is briefly introduced in the first chapter, but it is
then employed throughout the other three chapters dealing with different
types of expertise. In the second chapter, on perceptual expertise, it is dis-
cussed in relation to another key concept, that of holistic processing. It is
then dealt with in more detail in the third chapter, on cognitive expertise,
as the term is mostly associated with the research on memory and board
expertise. Finally, in the fourth chapter, on motor expertise, the reader

xiv Preface
should realize that one can consider sequences of motor movements, also
called motor programs, as constituting a special kind of chunk.
Instructors interested in adapting the text for their course can obtain
additional material, which includes presentation slides with high-reso-
lution figures, from a dedicated website for the book. The material also
includes links to popular science articles used in the book, as well as a col-
lection of links to the related content on the Internet. Beside students, my
hope is that the book will be of use for the wider public curious about the
way the brain enables expertise. The book is written in what I hope is a
simple and engaging style with plenty of references from real life, popular
culture, and sports. The content on the website dedicated to the book will
be another valuable resource to such readers. I am easily found on the
Internet and would be delighted to answer queries regarding the book.
Needless to say, this book, already a couple of years in the making,
would have been impossible without the help of many people very dear
to me. It would not have been possible without the patience of my wife,
Esther, to whom this book is dedicated. For all the hours spent on this
book which should have been used for so many other purposes, I apol-
ogize. I have exchanged countless drafts with Matthew Bladen, who was
instrumental in wrangling the text into something resembling standard
English, while making it difficult to work on the book in public without at-
tracting attention, due to the often hilarious comments he left in the mar-
gin. Thanks for all the help and friendship, Strong Bad! Most of the images
you will marvel at in the text are the work of my research assistant, Anna
Stylianopoulou. She also read and commented on the manuscript, repunc-
tuating where necessary, and showed tremendous patience in dealing with
my many requests. My thanks also go to Nemanja Vaci and Wolfgang
Wicher, who contributed to the creation of graphs, as well as Mario Graf,
who checked the key terms and references. I am in debt to my colleagues
Guillermo Campitelli, Robert Langner, and Luca Turella for their com-
ments on earlier drafts of the book. They have undoubtedly made the
book better. The same goes for the many researchers who have discussed
their work with me, as mentioned in the book. Some of them were not
only kind enough to give me permission to redraw their figures, but also
provided me with their raw data. As always, any mistakes in the book are
solely my responsibility, and I am happy to have them drawn to my atten-
tion – my email address can easily be found on the Internet. Finally, the
folks at Cambridge University Press, Matthew Bennett, Brianda Reyes,
and Valerie Appleby, were extremely patient with me and were helpful
throughout the whole writing process. I am grateful to all of you, and I
sincerely apologize to those whom I somehow managed to omit.

Abbreviations
A1 – primary auditory area

ACC – anterior cingulate cortex
AF – arcuate fasciculus
AG – angular gyrus
AON – action observation network
CFE – composite face effect
DLPFC – dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
DTI – diffusion tensor imaging
EEG – electroencephalography
FFA – fusiform face area
FG – fusiform gyri
fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging
IFC – inferior frontal cortex
IFE – inverted face effect
IPS – intraparietal sulcus
LOC– lateral occipital cortex
LTM– long-term memory
LT-WM – long-term – working memory
M1 – primary motor cortex
MCI – mild cognitive impairment
MEG – magnetoencephalography
MEP – motor-evoked potential
MRS – magnetic resonance spectroscopy
MT+ – motion center
MVPA – multivariate voxel pattern analysis
OFA – occipital face area
OFC – orbitofrontal cortex
PCun – precuneus
PET – positron emission tomography
PHG – parahippocampal gyrus
PMd – premotor cortex dorsal

xvi List of Abbreviations
PMv – premotor cortex ventral

PPA – parahippocampal place area
RSC – retrosplenial cortex
S1 – primary somatosensory cortex
S2 – secondary somatosensory area
SMA – supplementary motor area
SMG – supramarginal gyrus
SoS – satisfaction of search
STG – superior temporal gyrus
STM – short-term memory
STS – superior temporal sulcus
V1 – primary visual area
WM – working memory

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction to Research on Expertise
Learning Objectives
• What is expertise, what are expertise domains, and who are experts?
• How do experts accomplish seemingly impossible feats? What are
cognitive mechanisms in expertise? Why is memory crucial for experts’
outstanding performance and how is it connected to other cognitive
processes such as attention and perception?
• How does the brain accommodate expertise?
• What is similar and what is different in the cognitive mechanisms of
expertise and their neural implementations in perceptual, cognitive,
and motor domains?
• How can expertise be used to investigate the human mind (and brain)?
1.1 Introduction
Imagine yourself on a tennis court. On the other side of the net is the five-
time Wimbledon champion, Serena Williams, preparing to serve – and
you are supposed to return her serve. With her serve regularly reaching
120 mph, you face a rather daunting task. The speed with which the tennis
ball reaches you simply does not allow you enough time to perceive and
react to its trajectory. In other domains that are seemingly based more on
brainpower than on speed and physicality, the situation may be no less
daunting. In the game of chess, not only are there numerous individual
objects on the chessboard, but they are all connected with each other.
The game of chess is so complex that some argue there are more possi-
ble combinations of moves in chess than there are atoms in the universe
(Shannon, 1950). Yet you are expected to find the best solution in an en-
vironment in which even the most powerful computer would need an
eternity to go through all the possibilities. You may be forgiven if you feel
as though you are lost in a jungle, as many beginners do when they start
playing chess. But losing a match in tennis or a game in chess is a small
worry in comparison with the daily pressure that radiologists have to en-
dure. Studying complex radiological images, they need to find suspicious
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316026847.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 Introduction to Research on Expertise
tissue that is almost impossible for an untrained eye to spot. Missing even
a tiny lump in a thorax X-ray may result in deadly complications for the
unfortunate patient.
When one considers the complexity of the environment, it is no
wonder that the feats performed by experts defy logic. The best ten-
nis players not only return serves on a regular basis, but also launch
their counter-attacks at the same time. The best chess players, known
as grandmasters, need only a few glances to spot a promising solution,
and experienced radiologists require a mere split second to spot an ab-
normality in an X-ray image. Research on expertise investigates exactly
how such seemingly impossible feats come together. On the one hand,
it studies how cognitive processes, such as perception, attention, and
memory, enable experts’ outstanding performance and how expertise
has been implemented in the brain. On the other, it focuses on indi-
viduals and identifies the characteristics and activities necessary for
the highest level of performance. I will tackle the widespread assump-
tion that experts possess special abilities not found in mere mortals in
the final fifth chapter. Here, in the introductory chapter, I will give an
overview of the cognitive processes behind experts’ outstanding per-
formance and will illustrate the way experts’ brains accommodate this
performance.
1.2 Definition of Expertise and Its Domains

It may seem almost trivial to ask for a definition of expertise. After
all, surely we know an expert when we see one. This might be the case
with the best chess and tennis players, as well as with radiologists who
save lives regularly. Their performances speak for themselves. However,
there are also a number of domains where experts have been designat-
ed by general consensus and not on the grounds of their performance.
We can assume that the politicians who are elected in local government
or national parliaments are seen as experts. After all, they have been
chosen by majority vote to tackle important problems in their society.
Similarly, people who entrust Wall Street brokers with their money for
investment presumably consider them experts in their business. Yet, on
more than one occasion, you have probably been stunned by the de-
cisions taken by your chosen representative, and these days it is clear
that Wall Street brokers cannot reliably predict the movement of the
financial market.
The main difference between radiology, chess, and tennis on the one
hand, and politics and the financial world on the other, is the nature of

1.2 Definition of Expertise and Its Domains 3
the environments. Pathological elements in radiology rarely change; the

rules in tennis and chess are constant. This consistency of environment
enables practitioners consciously or unconsciously to acquire knowledge
of regularities that will then be used in dealing with new situations. In
contrast, politics and the financial market are regulated by numerous un-
known factors, which make reliable prediction difficult if not impossi-
ble. Practitioners simply cannot acquire relevant knowledge as situations
constantly change. Previously acquired knowledge is often of little use.
Politicians and stockbrokers may be elected experts by people who trust
them, or even by their peers, but their performances are not consistently
outstanding enough for them to be considered experts. Experts are peo-
ple who produce clearly above average (outstanding) performances on a
regular basis (Ericsson, 2006). An expert performance is not a one-off. It
is not something that comes and goes. If you were to wake skilled chess
players in the middle of the night and show them a difficult chess puzzle,
they would find the solution without much difficulty, just as skilled radi-
ologists would find lesions in radiological images in the same situation.
Politicians and stockbrokers would probably need all day and night, and
a lot of luck, to get anywhere near that level of performance (for more
information about differences between expertise and other domains, see
Shanteau, 1992).
Classical expertise domains are stable environments. Changes do hap-
pen, such as new diseases, new makes of tennis balls, or new strings on
rackets, but they are usually small enough that they do not change the
environment radically and render previous knowledge irrelevant. Every
expertise domain provides a wealth of consistent information to its prac-
titioners. The co-occurring stable environmental constellations can be
acquired and, as we will see later in this chapter, experts find ingenious
ways of circumventing their cognitive limitations. Nonetheless, as anyone
who has tried his or her hand at sports or games can testify, expertise do-
mains are extremely complex, and mastering them takes years of dedicat-
ed practice. There are a lot of things to learn in any expertise domain. It
is exactly this knowledge of the particular features of the ever-repeating
constellations in a domain that enables experts to see the problems with
different eyes from novices. As we will see in the course of this chapter,
the reason why experts’ strategies are more efficient is not that they exe-
cute the individual parts of the strategies more quickly than novices. Their
performance is actually based on completely different kinds of strategies,
which have been enabled by experts’ knowledge of the domain. Novices
lack this knowledge and consequently have to rely on rudimentary cog-
nitive strategies.

Some other skills, or at least their components, take much less of our
time to acquire. Take, for example, the relatively simple task of quickly
rotating your foot, something we will consider later in the chapter. The
skill necessary for this task is quickly acquired. The rest of the time is
spent on refining the individual steps necessary to produce quicker and
quicker performance. In the end, the performance becomes more and
more efficient as the execution of the individual components becomes
automatic. The simple tasks that enable participants to quickly acquire
the skill are typical of the skill acquisition approach. The skill acquisi-
tion approach is similar to expertise in that it ultimately examines the
same thing – skill. The skills, however, are rather simple, since they are
designed for acquisition in a reasonable amount of time, unlike the clas-
sical expertise domains for which decades of intensive training are of-
ten necessary. Despite their differences, skill acquisition and expertise
are complementary research streams. Skill acquisition provides insight
into the very beginning of the road to excellence, whereas the expertise
approach offers an understanding of the processes at the end of the
same road. However, there are also marked differences. The strategy
in skill acquisition tasks is the same in both skilled and unskilled prac-
titioners. The simplicity of the tasks, or the short duration of practice,
prevents participants from coming up with qualitatively different strat-
egies. The experts ‘merely’ execute the same strategies more quickly.
One of the hallmarks of experts’ outstanding performance is the use
of qualitatively different cognitive strategies based on domain-specific
knowledge. These differences between skill acquisition and expertise
have also been evident in their neural implementation, as we will see
later in the chapter.
Now that we have cleared up the difference between skill acquisition
and expertise, let us consider some distinctive expertise domains. In the
opening paragraph we introduced some of the typical expertise domains.
Tennis, chess, and radiology were not chosen at random: they are all rep-
resentative of the three expertise domains, which we will examine in the
following chapters. Expertise in radiology requires the visual intake of
the information needed for the actual task of spotting lesions within ra-
diological images. As such, it will be used as a typical task of perceptual
expertise, relating to domains that predominantly rely on information
from our senses. It is evident that experienced radiologists also need to
engage their memory, as without it they would hardly be able to spot and
categorize lesions. The task itself, however, is a purely visual search task
that does not require the mental permutations we find in chess. Chess
players rely on the visual information from the chessboard, but for their

outstanding performance, they need to go beyond the available visual

information. They have to retrieve previously stored chess constellations
that may help them to understand the problem at hand, and then, in one
of the main aspects of their expertise, to imagine how the game could
proceed. Chess is an example of cognitive expertise, where information
from our senses plays a secondary role compared to the subsequent en-
gagement of memory and mental simulation. No chess game has been
won by just perceiving the situation on the board. Both radiology and
chess eventually require motoric responses, either indicating the lesion
within a radiological image, or executing a chess move on the board. The
motor component in these activities, however, is of no real significance.
The essence of sports such as tennis, on the other hand, is exactly the mo-
tor component in the performance. Tennis will therefore serve as a prime
example of motor expertise, relating to domains that are predominantly
shaped by motoric responses.
This book deals with all three domains, and one chapter has been de-
voted to each of the three primary expertise domains. Just as in everyday
life, where we perceive the world, make a mental image of it, and then
act on that image, the structure of the book corresponds to this funda-
mental process. After the introductory chapter, which you are reading
now, we will deal with radiology and other perceptual expertise domains
in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 is dedicated to cognitive expertise, and in it we
will see how the brain accommodates the highest levels of expertise in
chess and other skills based on memory, such as mental calculations. The
next part of the book, Chapter 4, will examine the cognitive and neural
mechanisms behind tennis and other motor skills, which depend heav-
ily on the motor component. In the final chapter, I will summarize the
recurring themes running through the previous chapters, highlight the
importance of expertise for neuroscience in general and discuss what
is necessary to become an expert. The division into perceptual, cogni-
tive and motor expertise is rather arbitrary, since all expertise domains,
despite their differences, rely on similar if not identical cognitive mech-
anisms; that is, interaction between basic cognitive processes. We will
briefly describe them in the next section before we turn to their neural
implementation.
1.3 Cognitive Mechanisms in Expertise

How do experts achieve these incredible coups? To understand the way
experts’ minds have been wired, it helps to take a step back and look
at everyday life. Believe it or not, you are an expert too, an everyday

expert. It might seem banal from your current perspective, but just re-
member how many things a small child needs to learn. Unlike you, they
cannot enter an unfamiliar room and immediately realize that it is an
office, a bedroom, or a living room. You will have no problem in finding
a light switch, should the lights suddenly turn off, but a small child would
need to learn the position of the light switch first. You have encountered
numerous versions of such rooms, you know what kinds of objects one
would expect in such rooms and how those objects relate to each other,
and you will certainly not look for the light switch on the floor or the
ceiling. Children need to develop their ‘room expertise’ through years of
exposure to rooms with all their contents and different variations. They
will store things that occur together in their memory, even if they do not
necessarily realize that they are picking up on such regularities in their
environment. With lots of exposure, they will eventually reach your level
of ‘room expertise’!
It is not much different with experts. Through years of exposure, ex-
perts have acquired knowledge about consistencies in their domain
(Chase & Simon, 1973a; Gobet et al., 2001; Gobet & Simon, 1996d).
Complex domains, such as radiology, chess, playing an instrument, or
sport, obviously take more time to master than our everyday example
of rooms. However, all these domains feature ‘rules’ that are stable and
situations that arise again and again in one form or another. This knowl-
edge is stored in long-term memory (LTM), the process of material re-
tention that we usually refer to when we talk about memory in everyday
life. The name comes from the notion that the information stored here
will remain available for retrieval for weeks, months, or even decades.
This is in contrast to short-term memory (STM) where the content can
stay only for several seconds. Once experts encounter a seemingly new
situation in their domain, they will automatically activate the domain-
specific knowledge stored in LTM for a long time (Richman, Staszewski,
& Simon, 1995). The new situation will then be compared with previous-
ly encountered situations stored in LTM (Feigenbaum & Simon, 1984).
The consequence of this automatic matching of patterns in the outside
world and the brain is that experts quickly grasp the essence of the new
situation. Their LTM has stored not only similar combinations of details
to the one at hand, but also ways of dealing with such situations (Chase
& Simon, 1973b). These methods are automatically retrieved and help to
focus on the important aspects and ignore the irrelevant ones. Experts,
then, do not need extraordinary abilities to comprehend the complex
situations they face. Their knowledge enables them to look for the ‘light
switch’ in the right place.

1.3.1 Perceptual and Cognitive Expertise

If this example of the light switch seems too abstract, consider the
following example. Box 1.1, Figure 2 presents a chest X-ray that displays
a potentially deadly disease – pneumonia. Spotting it is not very easy,
but experienced radiologists manage to identify such lesions with re-
markable success even if the image is presented for a fifth of a second,
only slightly longer than the blink of an eye (Kundel & Nodine, 1975).
In contrast, medical students who have encountered only a handful of
chest X-rays are basically guessing when they perform this task. The task
illustrates how a rich knowledge base of visual patterns enables expe-
rienced radiologists to quickly figure out what is going on in a problem
presented to them. Once experts grasp the gist of the situation, they can
immediately focus on the important aspects and ignore the irrelevant
ones. Take a look at the image presented in Figure 1.1. It is again an X-ray
image containing a lesion, circled in the figure, but this time experienced
radiologists and medical students have more than just an eye blink to
find the lesion. An eye tracker, a device for recording the direction that
the eye is looking in, provides insight into their search strategies. We
can see how radiologists do not waste much time and almost immedi-
ately focus on the lesion, leaving a large part of the image unexamined.
Medical students in contrast, cannot afford to leave unturned any part of
the X-ray if they are to spot the lesion. Their eyes cover the whole extent
of the image.
Figure 1.1 Radiological expertise. Experienced radiologists need only a few glances to figure
out what is going on in an X-ray (left panel). Consequently, they fix their eyes on the lesion
almost immediately, unlike less experienced radiologists, who need to investigate the whole
image (right panel). The black circle is the location of the nodule, white circles represent where
the eyes fixated, and lines represent the eye movements.

We find the same situation in the seemingly more cognitive domain of

chess. Chess positions are made of numerous pieces and pawns (as the
chess objects are called) spread across the board. These objects may not
make much sense to you, but they form a meaningful unit to experienced
chess players. Like the experienced radiologists, they need just a brief
glance to figure out what is going on. When chess experts are asked to
locate certain kinds of pieces (e.g., knights and bishops) among the other
pieces and pawns, they focus on the objects of interest almost immediate-
ly, without having to examine the rest of the board. In contrast, novices
need to examine the whole board to make sure they have located all
the pieces of the specified kind (Bilalić, Langner, Erb, & Grodd, 2010).
Chapter 3 on cognitive expertise will deal in great detail with this study
(see Figure 3.13 for remarkably similar eye movement patterns to those
of radiologists and medical students in Figure 1.1).
The search strategies of expert chess players and experienced radi-
ologists are not only extremely efficient, but also surprisingly similar
given how much radiology and chess differ at first sight. The similarity
comes from the fact that in both domains LTM enables the fast intake
of incoming information by matching it with its content. The matching
between incoming sensory information and stored information in LTM
is called pattern recognition. This pattern recognition process automat-
ically draws information about many other aspects, including possible
locations of certain objects connected to the recognized situation. The
consequence of this represents the essence of expertise: attention is au-
tomatically drawn to important aspects of the situation. In this way an
expert can reduce the complexity of the environment and deal with it
successfully, despite limited cognitive resources. They are faster and more
efficient, but not because they can examine all the aspects of the prob-
lem more quickly than novices. They focus their limited resources on the
important aspects of the environment, disregarding other less inform-
ative elements. Their knowledge enables them to employ qualitatively
different strategies from those used by novices. Novices may not have
inherently weaker cognitive abilities than experts, but they lack specific
knowledge that guides perception, and feel overwhelmed by the com-
plexity of the situation. Their strategies are rudimentary and reflect the
lack of domain-specific knowledge.
It is one thing to find a certain piece on the chessboard, and completely
another to find a good solution to the problem that all the pieces and
pawns on the board together pose. After all, chess players’ task is to
find good moves, not identify objects! How, then, can experts find the
right path in the jungle of possibilities that chess constellations create?

A popular explanation is that they can calculate and foresee numerous

moves in advance. Without this extraordinary ability it would be difficult
to produce the performances that they do. How could they know if the
situation in 10 moves from now will favor them, if they do not mental-
ly simulate those situations in their head, in what is usually called the
mind’s eye? The Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot (1978/1946) set out
to investigate, among other things, this particular question. He devised a
task that captures the core of chess expertise – finding the best solutions.
Instead of letting players go ahead and play numerous moves, spending
several hours on a single game, as they usually do, de Groot devised a
laboratory task that is simple enough to be conducted in 15 minutes and
yet truly mimics the behavior of chess players during the actual game.
He presented chess players with a situation from an unknown tourna-
ment game depicted in Figure 1.2, and asked them to find the best move.
He also asked them to verbalize their thoughts by the think aloud tech-
nique while they were looking for the best solution. It was not surprising
that some of the world’s best chess players, grandmasters, came up with
better solutions than their weaker colleagues, whom I will call ordinary
experts as they were indeed skilled chess players, but not at the highest
level. The real surprise was the structure of the search, which did not
differ between the groups: the best experts anticipated scarcely any more
moves, as measured by the number of half-moves, or plies, they consid-
ered in advance, than ordinary experts. Both the best and the ordinary
chess experts would first categorize the position as belonging to a certain
Figure 1.2 Chess expertise. Chess players were given an unknown chess position (left panel)
and asked to think aloud while they looked for the best move (for aspiring chess players among
readers, 1. Bxd5 wins). The best players (grandmasters) found better solutions, but they did not
search more deeply than their weaker colleagues (right panel).

type, and would then on this basis retrieve common plans and possible
solutions. The search after the initial phase did not differ, but the solution
quality indicates that the initial phase did. The best players could grasp
the essence of the position much better than their weaker colleagues.
They could focus their analytic search efforts immediately on promising
solutions, while weaker players were left investigating irrelevant paths.
The pattern of results is reminiscent of the strategies found in the previ-
ously described visual searches in radiology and chess. Instead of exam-
ining irrelevant aspects of the environment like novices, experts could
immediately focus on the informative elements.
One of the main reasons for experts’ perceptual advantage is that they
process the environment differently. Instead of perceiving individual ob-
jects, such as pawns, for example, experts form meaningful units of individ-
ual objects, also called chunks. In the case of chess, a king who has moved
into a corner, as in Figure 1.2, would make a chunk together with the neigh-
boring rook and the pawns. These chunks have been acquired through ex-
periencing common occurrences of the objects in the environment, and
have been stored in experts’ LTM. They present the content of experts’
memory, also called knowledge structures, which become more elaborate
as experts gain more experience. The best experts have such sophisticated
knowledge structures that they can grasp the essence of a complex situa-
tion within seconds. Chapter 3 will expand on the nature of the perceptual
advantage of experts in the initial phase (see Figures 3.12 and 3.13).
The short historical account of the research on expertise demonstrates
that domain-specific knowledge provides the core of the outstanding
performance of experts. The acquired knowledge structures in LTM
not only enable experts to orient themselves quickly in a new situation
through clever guidance of attention to important aspects, but they also
automatically provide good ways of dealing with the new situation. This
also means that experts will always have a preconceived way of dealing
with almost any situation relating to their expertise domain. Could this
inseparable link between memory, attention, and problem solving make
experts inflexible and blind to new alternatives? The study presented in
Box 1.1 uncovers the cognitive mechanisms behind such a phenomenon.
Box 1.1 The Curse of Expertise, or Why Do Good Thoughts

Block Better Ones?
We have seen that good ideas come easily to experts, almost immediate-
ly upon seeing the problem. What happens if the first idea that comes to
experts is not the best one? Can experts get rid of their initial thought and

Box 1.1 (cont.)

examine the situation with a ‘fresh pair of eyes’? Together with Peter McLeod
of Oxford University and Fernand Gobet of Liverpool University (Bilalić &
McLeod, 2014; Bilalić, McLeod, & Gobet, 2008a, 2008b, 2010), I examined
the question of the (in)flexibility of experts by presenting chess players with
situations depicted in Box 1.1, Figure 1 that contained two solutions: one
being familiar (coming immediately to mind) but suboptimal, and the other
less familiar, but optimal. The less familiar solution was still reasonably well
known by players and would easily be found when presented in isolation,
without the first solution. The question, however, was whether it would be
found when presented alongside a more salient solution that would draw at-
tention at the beginning. Indeed, some highly skilled chess players did man-
age to shake off the initial idea and spot the better one. Numerous other
weaker players, albeit still experts, were less successful. To find out why some
expert players could not find the optimal less familiar solution, we recorded
their eye movements. All players spotted the familiar solution first and then
insisted they were looking for a better solution, which they failed to find.
Their eye movements, however, told a different story. Experts still examined
the elements of the first solution that came to their mind and did not pay
much attention, as measured by eye movements, to the elements related to
50 Longer Solution
8
Time Spent on Key Squares (%)
Shorter Solution
7 40
6
30
5
20
4
3 10
2
0
First 10 Middle Last 5
1 seconds seconds
a b c d e f g h Problem Solving Period
Figure 1 Einstellung (set) mechanism – why do good thoughts block better ones? The
presented problem (left panel) could be solved with a shorter optimal solution (1. Qe6+
Kh8 2. Qh6! Rd7 3. Qxh7 mate, or 2. … Kg8 3. Qxg7 mate) or a familiar but longer solu-
tion (the so-called smothered mate: 1. Qe6+ Kh8 2. Nf7+ Kg8 3. Nh6++ Kh8 4. Qg8+
Rxg8 5. Nf7 mate). The squares on the chessboard which are important for the optimal
solution (squares) and the familiar long solution (circles) have been indicated. The players
found the familiar solution but said they were looking for a better solution. However, they
spent most of their time on the squares important for the familiar solution (right panel).

Box 1.1 (cont.)

the optimal less familiar solution. It seems that the experts tried to look for
a better solution but that their attention had already been influenced by the
previously retrieved solution, which unconsciously biased their subsequent
perception. They certainly looked for better solutions, but those ‘new’ solu-
tions were inevitably only variations of the already found old solution.
A similar phenomenon is found in radiology. As we have demonstrated,
the expertise of experienced radiologists is truly remarkable, as they need
only a glance to spot most abnormalities, and when they are forced to search
through the radiological image, their search is highly efficient (see Figure
1.1). For example, when presented with the X-ray in Box 1.1, Figure 2, the
experienced radiologists very quickly recognized a lesion, the pneumonia le-
sion circled in the image. However, once they had spotted the abnormality
characteristic of pneumonia, even the most experienced radiologists found it
difficult to identify another abnormality in the X-ray – a nodule, indicated by
an arrow in the image, that may indicate cancer. The nodule is visually less
salient than pneumonia, but that is not the reason why it was not spotted.
If the nodule is presented on its own, without pneumonia, radiologists reg-
ularly find it. This phenomenon is called satisfaction of search (SOS), but
in practice it was not the case that the radiologists terminated the search
for lesions immediately after they had found the first lesion. Eye movement
Figure 2 Einstellung in radiology. There are two abnormalities in the image: (1) that
of pneumonia (circle) and (2) the nodule (arrow). The pneumonia is readily visible and
immediately spotted, but the nodule is often subsequently missed. If the nodule is
presented on its own, without the pneumonia, radiologists normally spot the nodule.

Box 1.1 (cont.)

recordings show that they continued to look for other lesions, just as the
chess experts continued to look for a better solution. They do not seem to
have been able to find it because the previously found lesion possibly still
influenced their attention, not unlike the first idea biasing chess experts’ per-
ception of the problem. Although the sources of this peculiar misfiring of
radiological expertise have not been identified yet, there is no denying that
the presence of the abnormality found first (pneumonia) makes the detec-
tion of the second abnormality (nodule) difficult (for a review, see Berbaum,
Franklin, Caldwell, & Schartz, 2010).
The so-called Einstellung phenomenon found in chess and radiology nicely
illustrates the mechanisms behind expertise that encompass the automatic re-
trieval of good ideas from memory and how those ideas direct attention to the
most important aspects of the problem. This usually results in efficient expert
performance. Here, though, we see a downside of the otherwise highly effi-
cient mechanism – other ideas, sometimes even better ones, may be difficult
to spot because of the presence of the initial idea. The next time you are about
to lose your patience with friends who simply cannot see an obvious idea, re-
member that your friends might be really trying hard and that initial thoughts
may be preventing them from fully appreciating the situation in question.
1.3.2 Motor Expertise

So far we have seen how skilled radiologists and chess players trick their
limited cognitive system in order to solve problems in their domains. What
about the tennis players mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? It is
one thing, you might say, to find a lump in a chest X-ray or the best move
in a game of chess, but completely another to return a quickly approaching
tennis ball. After all, you have about half a second before Serena’s serve
drops in front of you. In that time you need to figure out which side the
ball is heading towards, and the exact spot where it is going to land. At the
same time, you also need to initiate and execute your return. On the face of
it, nobody should be able to pull off the feat of returning a serve, let alone
returning it well. Yet we see the best tennis players doing exactly this on a
daily basis. Do the principles discussed in relation to perceptual and cog-
nitive domains, such as radiology and chess, hold for motor domains too?
Researchers have tackled this question by inventing the occlusion par-
adigm (Abernethy & Russell, 1987; Jones & Miles, 1978). Expert and nov-
ice tennis players watch a video of a full service motion up to the point
when the racket connects with the ball. They are then asked to predict

the side and spot where the ball will land without being able to see the
further ball trajectory. Experts are, of course, much better at predicting
the landing position of the ball. The critical manipulation comes when
certain parts of the video are occluded. It turns out that both expert and
novice tennis players’ prediction suffers most when the racket is not vis-
ible just before the impact. The position and movement of the racket are
therefore used as cues to predict the trajectory and landing spot. Experts,
however, also exploit other perceptual cues. When the body, or even the
arm holding the racket, was not visible, experts’ performance deterio-
rated. Novices do not seem to extract cues from body movements, and
their performance was not affected by this manipulation (Abernethy &
Russell, 1987). In other words, long before the ball makes contact with
the racket, experts can start preparing for their motor sequence. It is not
an understatement to say that experts can foresee the future. For exam-
ple, the Portuguese soccer player Ronaldo, one of the best players in the
world, could find the net with a shot even if the lights were switched off
just after the ball was released towards him. The infrared cameras later
showed him taking perfect volleys and headers even though he was oper-
ating in complete darkness and could not see where the ball was. The first
few moments before the ball was released were enough for him to know
where to be and what to do to get the ball in the net (McDowall, 2011).
There is no question that movements play a great role in sports. It is
also reasonable to assume that experts are better at manipulating their
bodies, as we will see in the example of another soccer superstar lat-
er in the chapter. The motor component, however, is not the only part
of the sport puzzle. Arguably the biggest differences are in perception
of the environment prior to the movement execution. No matter how
good the technique of your serve-return, or how quick you are to react,
you are most likely to be in a losing position if you cannot reliably pre-
dict where the serve is going to land. This is particularly the case in team
sports, such as basketball and soccer, in which numerous participants
and their movements create complex, interrelated situations. ‘Reading’
the game well is essential for experts in those domains. Tennis players,
for example, use advance perceptual clues from their opponent’s body
movement to predict where the serve is going to land. Their experience
and practice have enabled them to quickly recognize the most important
perceptual cues from their opponents’ movements. In that sense, tennis
players are not much different from chess players. They have fine-tuned
their perceptual and attentional system and pick up the most promising
information in an extremely complex environment. Novices, on the other
hand, do not possess the experience and knowledge necessary to guide

their attention towards the most informative aspects of the setting. They
are lost in the sea of information and can expect an uncertain future!
Expertise in both cognitive and motor domains involves a highly ef-
ficient interaction between attention and perception that results in out-
standing performance. However, the interplay between these cognitive
processes is enabled by acquired domain-specific knowledge, which has
been stored in LTM. The content of memory guides attention to the right
places and consequently biases the perception of experts. Even if, in cog-
nitive domains, the memories are of a perceptual nature, and in motor
domains they are made of kinetic information, they are nevertheless mem-
ories that power experts’ outstanding performance. In Chapters 3 and 4
we will talk about differences and similarities in the memories typical of
cognitive and motor domains. In the next section we will see that the way
the brain implements expertise very much depends on those memories.
1.4 How the Brain Accommodates Expertise

Now that we have seen the cognitive mechanisms of perceptual, cognitive,
and motor experts, let us consider how they have been implemented in the
brain. To do so, we need first to get an overview of the techniques com-
monly used to gain insight into brain processes. After that, we will con-
sider the brain’s remarkable ability to adapt to environmental demands.
1.4.1 Neuroimaging Techniques

Thanks to the technical advances in the last couple of decades, there have
never been more ways of looking into the brain’s functioning. Arguably
the most widespread technique is functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI). Since the activated brain areas need more blood for proper func-
tioning than disengaged areas, there is more blood in these areas because
the brain oversupplies them with blood. The fMRI exploits this property
of the brain and provides an indirect measure of brain activation by cap-
turing how much blood was present in particular areas of the brain at a
certain point in time. As presented in Figure 1.3, fMRI enables rather pre-
cise location of the activation, within millimeters, but its measurements
always lag behind the precise time of activation because the blood needs
a few seconds to reach the engaged areas. More temporal precision is
offered by magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures magnetic
fields produced by electrical currents in the brain. MEG captures brain
activity within milliseconds and offers relatively precise localization. Its

Figure 1.3 Neuroimaging techniques. Temporal and spatial properties of different

neuroimaging techniques.
older relative, electroencephalography (EEG), also offers the precise

temporal resolution of the MEG, but lacks its accuracy in localization as
it uses electrical currents around the scalp. Positron emission tomogra-
phy (PET) is hardly used nowadays for research purposes as it involves
invasive measures of introducing tracers into the body, which are then
distributed to activated areas through blood flow. The emission of the
tracer is measured and enables great precision, but its temporal proper-
ties are even worse than those of fMRI.
These are functional neuroimaging techniques that measure brain
activity and therefore provide insight into the brain’s functioning. Structural
neuroimaging techniques help research the measurement of anatomical
properties of the brain. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) allows meas-
urement of structural properties by converting the brain volume into vox-
els, small three-dimensional structures. The number of voxels can then be
compared between groups for any individual part of the brain. This way,
VBM measures the gray matter, the darker tissue consisting of neurons.
Besides morphological characteristics, one can also measure connections
within the brain, as neurons have been connected to each other through
white matter. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) captures this property of the
brain and provides measurements of connectivity between brain regions.
1.4.2 Organism Adaptability

One of the main foundations for the acquisition of expertise is cer-
tainly the remarkable adaptability of the human body. As you might
have noticed, just a few weeks of going regularly to the gym may have

a noticeable effect on your muscles. Now imagine that you are doing
similar activities on a daily basis for years or even decades. We know
that specific activities, such as focused practice (which we will cover later
in the chapter), have a huge impact, not only on our performance, but
also on our bodies. For example, the hearts of endurance runners are of
larger than average size as long as they are in training and competition,
but revert to a normal size when the runners cease these activities, just
as your muscles may disappear when you stop making regular gym visits.
The physiological properties of professional athletes are different from
those of mere mortals, but the differences exist because their bodies have
adapted to the demands of the focused practice that they are executing
in training. Anatomical properties can also be modified with appropri-
ate and timely practice. Ballet dancers have an uncanny ability to turn
their feet, due to stretching practice at an early age, before the bones and
joints were calcified in late childhood. A similar effect may be seen with
pitchers in baseball and bowlers in cricket, in whom unnatural placement
and movement of the ball-handling arm have been enabled through early
exposure to specific practice activities. We will see in the next sections
that general abilities may differ between people but become increasingly
less relevant as people start acquiring domain-specific knowledge. Here,
initial anatomical and physiological differences also seem to be modified
by domain-specific practice to such an extent that it becomes difficult to
believe that they play any causal role in expertise.
What about the organ that orchestrates everything, the brain? A com-
mon topic throughout this book will be the interaction between innate
biological factors and external environmental factors. These two large
groups of factors are intertwined in such a complex manner that it is dif-
ficult to speak of their isolated influence on development. They may be
recognizable and separable at the beginning of development, but the end
product is an amalgam of both factors. This is most obvious when we con-
sider the development of the brain from birth into maturity. Humans have
a genetic basis for brain development, but it is also increasingly clear that
the development of the brain depends on many external factors, ranging
from nutrition to environmental stimuli. In this book we will focus on
these external stimuli, but this does not mean that the innate factors are
not important. However, external stimuli are at the heart of any expertise
and are consequently one of the main topics in the research on expertise.
Take, for example, the changes of your brain during your teenage years.
This is the period characterized by the big changes in your brain, but the
biggest change most likely happened during the first year of your college
studies. Not only did you leave your home for the first time, but you also

experienced an amazing wealth of unfamiliar stimuli, which comes with

being a new college student. Everything is new and your brain goes into
overdrive, structurally changing its properties (Bennett & Baird, 2006).
The environment plays a large role in the development of the brain.
This is particularly evident in expertise. Consider, for example, a short
practice exercise that involves moving the fingers of one hand in a pre-
dictable pattern, just as pianists would do. In the fourth chapter we will
see that in only a week of practice, the functional properties of the motor
strip responsible for the voluntary control of movements have changed
(Pascual-Leone et al., 1995). The brain areas responsible for the control of
fingers have considerably expanded through practice (see Box 4.1, Figure
1 in Chapter 4). The same cortical increase is found when people practice
with other parts of the body, such as legs. If just a brief practice enlarges
functional representation of the body parts engaged in the practice, then
experts who have practiced for years should also display markedly dif-
ferent functional properties, if not structural ones. Indeed, the functional
representation of fingers in the brains of musicians is greater than in those
of non-musicians with the difference being the largest in the case of the
little finger, as can be seen in Figure 4.5 in Chapter 4 (Pantev, Engelien,
Candia, & Elbert, 2001). The little finger is of little use to people in every-
day life, but it plays a crucial role in music performance. The structural
differences between right-handed musicians and non-musicians were also
found in the right motor cortex, responsible for the voluntary movement
of the left side of the body (Amunts et al., 1997). Unlike musicians, most
right-handed people do not use their left hand very often. Consequently,
their structural representation of the left hand is underdeveloped in com-
parison to musicians, who need their left hand in musical performance. In
Chapter 4 on motor expertise, we will consider more examples of brain
adaptability to the motor demands of the environment.
The brain’s uncanny ability to adapt to any environment, generally
known by the term brain plasticity, is on display in blind people too. The
visual cortex, encompassing the occipital lobe and parts of the tempo-
ral lobe, is seemingly of no use to blind people. However, the brain un-
dergoes an amazing transformation that enables blind people to engage
the nominally visual part of the brain when they process information
from other sensory modalities. For example, when blind people recog-
nize an object only by touch, they generally demonstrate activation in
the occipital lobe (see Figure 2.11 in Chapter 2). People with normal
eyesight do not show any brain activation within the occipital lobe
when they recognize objects exclusively through touch (Sadato, 2005).
The next chapter, which is devoted to perceptual expertise, will examine

this phenomenon in more detail, but in the fifth and final chapter we will
consider whether this additional availability of the cortical mass makes
blind people better at perception of non-visual information.
1.4.3 Functional and Structural Reorganization

Before we proceed to the neural implementation of expertise, it is worth
considering how the brain develops some of the everyday skills we take
for granted. Take, for example, perception of faces and scenes, an im-
mensely important skill, which most of us are pretty good at. Even as
children we were remarkably good at recognizing faces and places, most
likely because we had been exposed to them practically from birth. As we
age and our brain becomes more and more mature, we also have more
time to practice the perception of faces and scenes. Consequently, we
are better at face and scene recognition as young adults than as children.
Perception of faces and perception of places are differently implement-
ed in the brain. Even though both categories are neurally implemented
roughly at the bottom of the temporal lobe, also called the inferotempo-
ral cortex, faces engage a part of the fusiform gyrus (FG) whereas plac-
es engage the neighboring parahippocampal gyrus (PHG). Even more
interesting is the developmental pattern in these areas (Grill-Spector,
Golarai, & Gabrieli, 2008; Scherf, Behrmann, Humphreys, & Luna, 2007).
As one becomes an adult, and presumably becomes exposed to more
stimuli, the activation for scenes as measured by fMRI becomes more
and more concentrated around a single part of the PHG. The initially
widespread brain activation necessary for scene processing has given way
to a focused concentration around a single brain area. In contrast, the
area in the FG relevant to faces expands with maturation and practice so
that it is bigger in adults than in children. These phenomena are examples
of functional reorganization, a process whereby the brain restructures the
way it processes the stimuli. As we will see throughout the book, func-
tional reorganization is particularly typical of expertise, where the brain
needs to accommodate the different cognitive mechanisms of experts.
The face perception example here presents a particular example of func-
tional expansion, because practice, which inevitably comes with maturity,
has led to the expansion of the brain activity in a particular brain area.
Both young and older children utilize the same brain areas for face percep-
tion, but the extent of the activation in older children is considerably big-
ger. One of the main neural processes at work here is the creation of new
neuronal connections within a brain area. In contrast, an opposite process
seems to be at work in face perception. The brain area for scenes becomes

smaller with practice and maturity. Here we talk about functional reduc-
tion, where the main neural process is the pruning of unnecessary neu-
ronal connections. At the beginning, the brain engages a lot of resources
to achieve the feat of scene recognition. As the practice progresses and we
become more and more adept at the activity, the brain will need fewer and
fewer neural resources. The redundant connections between neurons will
be dropped and only the connections necessary for efficient processing will
remain. It is unclear why the development of face perception has a differ-
ent neural signature from that of scene perception, but the functional re-
duction, as a way for the brain to reduce the unnecessary activity and save
neural resources, is one of the characteristics of skilled activities in general.
As previously stated, in the above case it is difficult to disentangle the
influences of maturity and practice on the functional reduction. We can,
however, exclude the maturity factors in other activities, such as acqui-
sition of skills in adults, where maturity does not present an important
factor. Let us consider a simple visual-discrimination task where partic-
ipants have to respond if a presented word (e.g., donkey) is a member
of a specified category (e.g., animal) and ignore it if it is not (e.g., car).
It is a complex enough task that requires a lot of brain resources at the
beginning, as Figure 1.4 shows (Schneider & Chein, 2003). The frontal
Figure 1.4 Brain changes associated with practice. At the beginning of a simple visuo-
discriminatory task, the engagement of the prefrontal, premotor, and parietal areas reflects
the enormous resources the brain needs to execute the task (left panel). As people become
better and develop automaticity – that is, they can execute the task without much effort – the
activation disappears (right panel). Adapted with permission from Schneider & Chein, 2003.
(A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version,
please refer to the plate section.)

areas, important for manipulation of information in our memory, and the

parietal lobe, important for multisensory integration and spatial cogni-
tion, are all activated. They illustrate the difficulty of the task at the be-
ginning, as it requires a lot of attentional resources. As we practice and
become more proficient at executing individual parts of the task, we do
not need to devote so much attention to the task as a whole. We do not
need to think about what comes next, we just do it, almost automatically.
The consequence of this lack of attentional demands is a considerably
reduced pattern of activation after practice. The brain has adapted to
the constraints of the environment and consequently does not require as
many neural resources as it needed at the beginning.
1.4.4 Neural Implementation of Perceptual and Cognitive Expertise

One of the widespread assumptions about expertise is that we should
see less brain activation in experts than in novices (Guida, Gobet,
Tardieu, & Nicolas, 2012; Kelly & Garavan, 2005). After all, experts’ per-
formance is not only highly efficient; it also seems almost effortless, un-
like the ponderous performance of novices. It is therefore clear that the
brain reflects this difference by functional reduction; that is, reduction
in brain activity in experts. In the previous section we saw that develop-
ment and practice all may bind the brain resources to a particular area
rather than spread them around a few areas. However, in most cases we
were considering simple, skill acquisition tasks. We now know the dif-
ference between the two types of task and we know that there are plen-
ty of things going on in experts’ performance. We know that experts’
outstanding performance relies on previously stored knowledge and
quick orientation through focused attention. Experts’ brains need to ac-
commodate all these processes, from perceiving, to matching patterns
through retrieval of stored knowledge from LTM, to focusing attention.
Novices’ performance in comparison looks almost trivial. There is no
retrieval of knowledge, or at least not to the same extent as in experts,
because novices do not have much knowledge to begin with. The pattern
recognition and subsequent guidance of attention are usually not pres-
ent in novices. Experts’ performance looks effortless and easy because it
requires qualitatively different strategies, and not because it is simply a
faster version of the strategies that novices employ (Bilalić, Kiesel, Pohl,
Erb, & Grodd, 2011; Bilalić et al., 2010; Bilalić, Turella, Campitelli, Erb,
& Grodd, 2012).
We can see how the brain accommodates the cognitive mechanisms
behind expertise if we consider the brain activation, as measured by
fMRI, of experts and novices in the above-mentioned task in radiology

and chess. Figure 1.5 shows a map of brain activity in skilled radiologists
and unskilled medical students when they were exposed for a split second
to a chest X-ray, just like the one in Figure 1.1 or Box 1.1, Figure 2. The
activation depicted is the difference between the perception of X-rays
and a visual control, the so-called baseline – in this case a blank, gray
screen with a black fixation cross in the middle. One can see that both ra-
diologists and medical students engage numerous brain areas more when
perceiving X-rays than when viewing the visual control. These brain areas
engaged in both radiologists and medical students are at the lateral (out-
side) side of the brain. When we look at the bottom of the brain, we can see
the activation in the inferotemporal cortex. Here the radiologists display
much greater activity in both fusiform gyri (FG) than medical students.
Actually, the activation in medical students in the left FG, when viewing
X-rays, is hardly different from when they look at the visual control.
What we witness here is a common occurrence in the neuroimaging
studies on expertise, the phenomenon of functional expansion. Experts
will often have more activation in the same area, and may even engage
Figure 1.5 Neural implementation of (radiological) expertise. Experienced radiologists and

medical students engage similar lateral brain areas (upper panel) when they are presented with
an X-ray for only 200 ms. The differences are found only in the inferotemporal cortex (lower
panel) because the radiologists engage both the left and right fusiform gyri (FG – circled in the
figure), and students only the right FG. Even there, the activation in students is much weaker
than in radiologists. The left FG in students shows scarcely more activation than when viewing
the control visual stimuli. The strength of fMRI activation is represented by color – the brighter
the color, the more activation there is. (A black and white version of this figure will appear in
some formats. For the color version, please refer to the plate section.)

different areas. In the radiology study, the right FG in medical students

showed some activation, but the left FG showed hardly any activation.
We will discuss other examples of the functional expansion in the follow-
ing chapters.
It does seem that generally more activation takes place in experts’ brains
than in those of novices. This is in sharp contrast to the prevailing notion
of functional reduction in experts. The expansion of brain activation in
experts may not come as a surprise when we consider the cognitive mech-
anism behind experts’ performance. The brain needs to accommodate all
the knowledge-related processes that characterize experts’ efficient per-
formance. It is not by chance that the functional expansion in perceptual
and cognitive domains takes place in the temporal lobe (Guida, Gobet, &
Nicolas, 2013; Guida et al., 2012). The temporal lobe is the home of the so-
called ventral stream that carries visual information about the environ-
ment (Mishkin, Ungerleider, & Macko, 1983). This includes information
about the shape and color of individual objects, but also about more com-
plex situations that involve several interconnected elements. For exam-
ple, the FG and PHG at the inferior (bottom) and the lateral (outer) gyri
of the temporal lobe, which differentiated experts from novices in chess
and radiology (see Chapters 2 and 3 for more details), are known for
their role in the perception of everyday stimuli such as faces (Kanwisher,
McDermott, & Chun, 1997), bodies (Schwarzlose, 2005), places (Epstein
& Kanwisher, 1998), and words (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003).
In other words, if one is looking for knowledge about everyday stimuli in
the brain, the temporal lobe is the first place to look. It makes sense that
the brain will become more efficient by pruning unnecessary connections
with practice on the simple task, which is what we find in the research
on skill acquisition. It also makes sense that in expertise, where experts’
strategies are completely different from those of novices because of the
available domain-specific knowledge, the brain reacts by expanding its
activation by engaging additional brain areas in the temporal lobe.
The important message here is that the brain’s implementation of ex-
pertise closely follows the cognitive strategies that are responsible for
experts’ outstanding performance in the first place. To illustrate this im-
portant point further, consider the case of mental calculation. Most of us
are experts at calculating simple arithmetic tasks, such as 5 × 6. You can
retrieve the number without needing to actually compute the task. How
about multiplying 55 by 66? Now you will need to engage all your mental
capacities because you will need not only to retrieve well-known compu-
tations in your mind, but also to keep them available while you are com-
puting the steps necessary for the final solution. Some people, however,

have stored additional arithmetic facts, such as the product of 55 × 55, in

their memory. These facts can provide these people with shortcuts for
the other calculation, as they can retrieve the number from their mem-
ory and simplify the process. Instead of having to work out 55 × 66 from
scratch, they already know the result of 55 × 55 and only need to add to
it the product of 55 × 11 – a demanding arithmetic task, but still easier
to conduct than the initial 55 × 66. One still needs to keep in mind the
intermediate total, but expert mental calculators are well trained in using
their LTM for keeping track of the intermediate results during calcula-
tion and can easily retrieve them when they are needed. It is only fitting,
as we will see in Chapter 3, which is devoted to cognitive expertise, that
expert calculators need typical brain areas for LTM in order to complete
their computations quickly and accurately.
This is in stark contrast to other experts in mental calculation, abacus
experts. The abacus is an external device, which employs beads and col-
umns to represent numbers and their permutations. You may have en-
countered the abacus at the beginning of your education, but the odds
are that you are not a proficient user unless you were educated in Asia,
where the abacus enjoys widespread popularity. Here it will be sufficient
to say that abacus experts could easily calculate 55 × 66 in a few seconds
(for more details, see Chapter 3 on cognitive expertise). As abacus prac-
titioners become more proficient, they do not even need it in front of
them. They can simply imagine it and manipulate the beads in their mind!
The end product is a mental calculation based on an imaginary external
device. Abacus experts, however, activate the parietal areas responsible
for the visual and spatial processes necessary for the mental manipula-
tion of the imaginary abacus. Mental calculation with an abacus engages
completely different areas from those found in expert mental calculators
who rely on memory. The differences in the strategies, one based on the
use of memory and the other of visuo-spatial imagery, are reflected in the
different neural signatures.
1.4.5 Neural Implementation of Motor Expertise

Unlike perceptual and cognitive expertise, motor expertise is not ideally
suited to investigation with neuroimaging techniques. With current tech-
nology, it is not possible to put tennis players into an MRI scanner and ask
them to return a serve! However, researchers have found ways around
this problem by showing films of typical actions such as a tennis serve
and asking for a prediction of what will happen next (i.e., where the ball
will land). These studies on the anticipation skill of motor experts build

upon one of the most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, that of mirror

neurons (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Mirror neurons fire when people
execute movements, and, for this reason, are extremely important for the
voluntary control of movements, the essence of any motor expertise. The
surprising property of mirror neurons is that they also become activated
when movements are merely being observed! In a sense, the brain simu-
lates the actions of others with the help of the mirror neurons. This pro-
vides a neural mechanism for understanding the intentions of others and
is extremely important in daily social interaction. In the context of sports,
it is of similarly paramount importance because it enables motor experts
to gain insight into the intentions of opponents by simulating their motor
behavior.
Before we describe the neural implementation of motor expertise in
detail, it is worth considering how and where motor knowledge – that is,
kinematic information – is stored in the brain. You will almost certainly
have heard the term muscle memory, which is commonly used to describe
the ability to execute a series of complex movements without having to
think about their execution. In other words, it is as if the muscles pos-
sess a memory and automatically move on their own. The series of com-
plex movements that you need, for example, when you want to execute
a tennis serve, is called a motor program. Motor programs can be seen
as a specific type of chunk, where a number of isolated elements have
been grouped together. Motor programs, however, represent kinematic
information packed together, a series of individual movements that ena-
ble the execution of a tennis serve. As much as we have the feeling that
the muscles in our limbs execute the tennis serve, everything is directed
from within our brain. The term ‘motor program’ is a cognitive construct,
but the mirror neurons give it a neural basis. The mirror neurons, or the
action observation network (AON), as they are collectively called in hu-
mans because of their motoric and perceptual properties when viewed as
a group, are found in the prefrontal areas (the inferior frontal gyrus), pre-
motor areas, and parietal areas (the inferior and superior parietal lobe
together with the dividing intraparietal sulcus), but also in the temporal
lobe (posterior middle temporal gyrus) and cerebellum. The AON areas,
depicted in Figure 1.6, send the information about motor programs that
need to be executed to the primary motor areas, which then engage the
muscles of the limbs via the spine.
The AON not only initiates the motor response, but also enables motor
experts to figure out what is going to happen by observing the action of
other motor experts. To come back to the tennis serve example, various
studies (Balser, Lorey, Pilgramm, Naumann, et al., 2014a; Wright, Bishop,

Figure 1.6 Action observation network (AON) in motor expertise. The AON, the human
counterpart of the mirror neurons, encompasses the prefrontal (IFG = inferior frontal gyrus),
premotor (PMv = premotor ventral; PMd = premotor dorsal), and parietal areas (SPL = superior
parietal lobe; IPS = intraparietal sulcus; IPL = inferior parietal lobe), as well as the temporal
areas (pMTL = posterior middle temporal lobe) and the cerebellum.
Jackson, & Abernethy, 2010) demonstrate that the frontal, premotor,

and parietal areas, the components of the AON, become activated when
tennis players need to anticipate where the serve is going to land in the
court. The activation pattern is typical of the expertise studies, as experts
activate the AON to a much larger extent than novices. Unlike novic-
es, experts possess motor knowledge, which becomes activated when
they anticipate the actions of others. The result is the activation in the
AON responsible for the implementation. Other studies (Balser, Lorey,
Pilgramm, Naumann, et al., 2014a; Balser, Lorey, Pilgramm, Stark, et al.,
2014b) directly identified the sections of the AON (e.g., the parietal lobe)
as the areas that successfully predict the accuracy of anticipation. It is
important to mention that some of the studies also identified other areas,
outside the AON, as important for the anticipation skill of motor experts.
One such area is at the posterior middle temporal lobe (pMTL), an area
believed to process motion. Other areas commonly found in the studies
on motor anticipation are parts of the cerebellum, a large anatomical
structure at the bottom of the brain believed to play an important role in
the timing of movements.
We have seen that all parts of the AON have been implicated in the
outstanding prediction performance of motor experts. How do they
come together to enable motor experts to foresee the future, as in the
case of the tennis serve? While the work on this issue is still in progress,

the current hypothesis is that the visual information from the occipital
lobe provides input for the parietal AON areas. The parietal AON areas
then simulate the most likely course of action based on the visuo-spatial
information with the help of prefrontal and premotor areas. Even the
areas that are not nominally a part of the AON network, such as the
pMTL and the cerebellum, may play a role in this interaction. The acti-
vated pMTL may send processed information about body motion to the
parietal cortex. The cerebellum, on the other hand, is important for pre-
cise temporal sequencing of body movements and, with its connection to
both the motor and premotor areas, may provide another source for the
premotor areas to simulate observed action.
Expert sportspeople foresee what will happen next by simulating the
action of others in the brain. Simulation is an essential part of anticipa-
tion and prediction. The AON, which enables the simulation, is therefore
the neural basis of anticipation in sports and can be considered as the
main engine that powers the outstanding performance of motor experts.
In Chapter 4 (devoted to motor expertise) we will see in more detail how
different occlusion conditions affect the AON.
1.5 Expertise as a Research Vehicle in Cognitive Neuroscience

Research on expertise uses the laboratory setting to uncover the cogni-
tive and neural mechanisms behind expertise. Expertise researchers take
great care to elicit the same outstanding performances in the laboratory
that one finds in experts’ domains, by devising laboratory tasks that are
representative of these domains. Experts should be facing similar, albe-
it simplified, versions of assignments that they usually face in their do-
mains. This approach has been called the expert performance approach
(Ericsson & Smith, 1991). The study by de Groot on problem solving,
which we considered earlier in this chapter, presents an example of how
this approach has been implemented in the game of chess.
Representative tasks are the essence of research on expertise.
However, they are not the only useful aspect of this research. Expertise
is by definition focused on practitioners who are skilled and who con-
sistently produce outstanding performances. Experts are regularly
pitted against novices, people who lack the knowledge and therefore
the skills of their expert peers. This contrasting approach, which I call
the expertise approach (Bilalić et al., 2010, 2012), has a long tradition
(Chase & Simon, 1973a; de Groot, 1978; Preacher, Rucker, MacCallum,
& Nicewander, 2005; Simon & Chase, 1973). Its main advantage over
the usual approach in cognitive (neuro)sciences, where all participants

are at the same skill level, is the presence of a control group of nov-
ices. By comparing people who possess sophisticated domain-specific
knowledge with people who lack this knowledge, we can obtain a clear-
er picture of the nature of cognitive processes and their development
(Vaci, Gula, & Bilalić, 2014). Novices represent a control group that
enables us to check whether the results obtained on experts are indeed
the consequence of domain-specific knowledge and not other factors
(Campitelli & Speelman, 2013). This in turn allows for the possibility
that even trivial aspects of expertise performance may have wider re-
percussions for cognitive (neuro)science.
Take, for example, the recent study (Naito & Hirose, 2014) of the
famous Brazilian soccer player, Neymar Jr., that captured headlines
worldwide. As seen in Figure 1.7, when required to rotate his right foot,
Neymar exhibited much less activation in the motor brain region re-
sponsible for foot movement than do other, presumably less skilled pro-
fessional soccer players. Professional swimmers, who do not necessari-
ly need to rotate their feet to achieve their performance, showed even
more activation in the foot motor region in the task. This is exactly the
pattern of results that we would expect on a simple skill acquisition task.
Foot movement is obviously a part of Neymar’s performance, but there
is so much more to being an excellent soccer player than moving the foot
around, as we will see in Chapter 4 on motor expertise. The task would
never qualify as a representation of soccer skill. Nevertheless, the study
illustrates the benefit of the expertise approach of comparing experts
with novices – we now know that practice not only enables one to quick-
ly move the foot, but also how it is indexed in the motor strip responsible
for the foot.
To further illustrate this point, consider one of the most heated debates
in neuroscience. An influential idea is that the human mind is composed
of modules, independent innate structures with clearly identified func-
tions (Fodor, 1983). A prime example of such modules in the human
brain would be the fusiform face area (FFA) (Kanwisher et al., 1997), the
area in the aforementioned FG at the inferior side of the temporal lobe.
Faces are of crucial importance for the human species, and it makes sense
that the brain evolved an area responsible for them, say the proponents
of the face specificity view (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006). Faces are also one
of the most encountered and practiced stimuli. It is clear that people have
developed extensive expertise with faces. The FFA could therefore be a
general expertise module responsible for differentiating between exem-
plars of the same category, be it faces or some other stimuli (Curby &
Gauthier, 2010; Gauthier, Tarr, Anderson, Skudlarski, & Gore, 1999).

Figure 1.7 Neymar’s foot. The activation in the motor strip responsible for foot control
when one is required to quickly move the foot is greatly reduced in Neymar, one of soccer’s
superstars, in comparison with less skilled soccer professionals and amateur soccer players.
The professional swimmer, who does not need to move the feet this way to swim fast, shows
much more activation in the motor cortex. Adapted with permission from Naito & Hirose, 2014.
(A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version,
please refer to the plate section.)
These opposing views have been tested by training people to become ex-
perts on new artificial objects (Gauthier et al., 1999). An increase in brain
activity in this area after training would support the general expertise
view, because this area cannot possibly be face-specific. This approach
takes time, and it is difficult to believe that several hours in a labora-
tory could be comparable to years and years of exposure and practice
in real-world expertise domains. A more practical solution would be to
find real-world experts and novices; that is, to apply the expertise ap-
proach, and see if their expertise modulates the FFA activation. This has

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fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, he said, in one of his
first letters, how useful it had turned out.”
The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being disturbed by
irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper crackling slightly
betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.
The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own
arm passes round his neck.
“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious tenderness,
as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress of a light kiss
dropped upon his grey hair.
“Who told you that I had a letter?”
“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”
For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten
him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about
Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”
She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if
she herself were its object.
“Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests.
“I have no objection to your seeing it!” returns he, with significant
emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.”
With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to search
in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too valueless to be
hoarded, and ends by bringing out from—where she had never doubted its
resting—the one nearest his heart the narrative of his son’s death, penned by
that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it, and, with head reverently
bowed, begins to read. It is written in pencil, evidently by one to whom
pens and stationery are non-existent, and in parts it is hard to decipher.
There is absolute stillness in the room. Country Life has fallen upon the
carpet, but Sir George forgets to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the
excellent reason that her eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service.
“Oh, what a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must never
—never”—catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon it—“never again
be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death! Oh, which of us does
not envy him? which of us would not change with him?”
She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her
passion the cold stream of her fiancé’s cynical question, “Who hath it? He
that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but why
does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s ear in a
sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be read, she dashes
her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading. But every sentence,
unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct passage from heart to
heart, blurs her voice afresh—
“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as to
read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “ ‘Never saw
anything to equal his pluck, except his patience—his colonel quite broke
down when he bid him good-bye—so cheerful—and making jokes even up
to——” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping.
“He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then against
his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries, striking the table
beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of rage—“these,” pointing to the
little relics tragic in their insignificance—“these are all that is left of him
and his career! These are all that I have left to live on!”
With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an
outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to
hesitate her small attempt at solace.
“Do we go quite for nothing? You have us left! We may not be much, but
we are something!”
No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and the
sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.
“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole
skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it keeps
whole!”
Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded
discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than she
had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.
“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing
before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he will
oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion of
feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be unkind
to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked him very
much! Oh!”—bowing her nut-brown head on his knees—“oughtn’t we to
love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”
CHAPTER III
The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast
face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the alternate
object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia Carew’s
home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a perhaps
less foolish death within the year. Being one of those completely
unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in belabouring, her
husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the doubly forsaken
baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had devolved the choice
of two alternatives—that of saddling himself for life with a creature against
whose entry into it he had always angrily protested, and that of sending it to
the workhouse, and being called an unnatural brute for his pains. He chose
the first; though, as everybody said, with a very ill grace. But the people
who kindly tried to tell her this in later days could never get Sir George
Campion’s niece to believe it.
Yet her life has scarcely been a bed of roses, though love has not been
lacking; and her three men have had that immense opinion of her which
makes up to most of her sex for any amount of bodily or mental char-ing.
Of women in her home, save servants, there have, within her recollection,
been none. Marriage is not an institution that seems to thrive in the
Campion family, and so early in Lavinia’s history that only the faintest blur
of memory of something kind and connected with cakes remains to the girl,
her uncle’s wife had slipped inoffensively away to the churchyard,
conveniently close to the pink-faced house. Often since she has grown up
into sense and thoughtfulness, Lavinia has speculated about that dim lady,
of whom no one now ever speaks—all others because they have forgotten
her, and one concerning whom no one knows wherefore he is silent—
speculated whether in her lifetime she had had as much buffer-work to do as
has fallen to Lavinia herself, and whether, not being of so robust a
constitution of mind or body, it had ended by killing her. For Lavinia is, and
for several years past has been, before all things, a buffer. Has there ever
been a day for so long as she can remember, when she has not been called
upon to use her characteristic gifts to deaden and smooth and blunt the jars
and bumps that her perpetually colliding men are always inflicting upon
each other? The fault has nearly always lain with the father, gifted with that
most infallible double endowment for ensuring unhappiness in life—a deep
heart and an impossible temper.
She is thinking of him with tender ruth next morning as she stands under
the verandah, looking across the downward slope of garden, grass, sun-dial,
and snowdrop borders, to the spacious view over the Weald of Kent,
Hastingswards. On her right, a towering hedge of espaliered elms parts her
—it alone and a few unseen green hillocks—from the little red-roofed
thirteenth-century church and its emerald God’s acre. From the top of the
church tower, it is said that on a clear day you can discern the masts of
ships, though not the very sea. To this kind of seeing there goes usually
more of imagination than eyesight; but the belief has, since the days of
King John, heightened the village’s opinion of itself. To the left the prospect
is bounded by the great group of horse-chestnuts, leafless now and purple,
in the Rectory garden.
It is to the Rectory that Lavinia is bound—the Rectory, where she gets
her fresh eggs, and carries some of her troubles. She is dressed in black for
her dead cousin; but the freshness of her cheeks and lips, and the sunshine
that lives in her hair, make it always difficult for her to look in mourning.
Her spirits are still tender from the emotion of last night, and her thoughts
musing pityingly upon her men—the live one who is taking his punishment
so deadly hard, and the dead who, though now so deified and enshrined in
his father’s broken heart, had not, any more than herself, found his short life
a bed of roses. Poor Bill! Never again would she have to insert the pad of
her smoothing words between his sensitiveness and the sting of his father’s
speech—that father who, though he would joyfully have died ten thousand
deaths for him, yet could not resist venting the gibes born of adversity and
constitutional ill humour upon the creature whom, “if Heaven had made
him such another world of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” he would not
have sold for it. Poor Bill!
With a heartfelt sigh she fetches her egg-basket and sets off through the
churchyard to her goal. It is a roundabout way, since the Rectory grounds
actually touch the wall at the bottom of the Campion garden; and there had
once, not so long ago, been a trellised door through which Rectory and
Place ran in and out at will, but in an unexplained spurt of resentment or
suspicion, Sir George had had it walled up. It has been a cause of great
inconvenience to himself, and he has very much repented it ever since the
spurt passed; but pride forbids him to undo his deed. The Rectory regrets it
too, but with wise and understanding want of resentment. Its own front gate
stands hospitably open, and the shortness of its drive soon brings the visitor
to the hall-door—wide open too—for the Rectory is nothing if not airy; and,
indeed, since the children could never remember to shut it after them, it
may as well gape legally as illegally.
“You are quite a stranger,” says the rectoress, turning with an air of relief
from her pile of household books; for though she is a good woman and does
her accounts, she is not of those who love them. “What became of you all
yesterday?”
“I was at the Princes’ most of the afternoon,” replies Lavinia, sitting
down with the air of an habitué, her egg-basket on her knees. “They were in
trouble—bad trouble, of a sort; but you must not ask me what.” Then,
seeing a humorous sparkle in her friend’s eye, she adds, half-laughing, “Oh,
I see that you are in the secret.”
“Féodorovna has just been here to proclaim her heroic deed,” says Mrs.
Darcy, drily.
“Isn’t it inconceivable?” cries Lavinia, starting up with a revival of the
passion of shame that had overcome her on first hearing of Miss Prince’s
exploit, while the egg-basket, happily not yet laden, rolls on the floor.
“There is no reason why it should turn you into one gigantic blush,”
replies her friend, looking at her with a grave smile. “You have not the
distinction of having been informed that a very successful General has no
immediate use for you!”
“Did you tell her what you thought of her?” asks the other, in a low
voice, and giving a start of maidenly ire at the suggested possibility.
“Why should I?” asks the clergyman’s wife, lifting her sensible, tolerant
eyes to her companion’s still discoloured countenance. “Would that have
undone it?”
“And you let her brag about it? You allowed her to believe——?”
Lavinia breaks off.
“I do not think that she left me with the impression that I admired her,”
replies the other in an exceedingly quiet key; and Miss Carew is at once
appeased and silenced.
“Yesterday was painful from start to finish,” resumes the girl, presently.
“Some days are like that, aren’t they? Yesterday”—with that respectful drop
of the voice which is our tribute to the departed—“poor Bill’s things came
back.”
The news brings a lump into the throat of the person addressed, for, like
most of his acquaintances, Mrs. Darcy had been fond of fine, plucky,
upstanding Bill Campion. It is a minute or two before she can dress her
sympathy in enough composure to say—
“And, of course, that upset him very much?”
“No; he was not upset,” replies Lavinia, a sort of hopeless pity in voice
and look. “He is never upset; it would be much better for him if he were—
and for us.”
“Yes, poor fellow!”
“I was afraid that we should have a dreadful dinner,” continues Lavinia,
with the relieved expansiveness of perfect intimacy addressing perfect
comprehension. “I was afraid he would have one of his attacks of hating us
for being alive!”
“He never hates you for being alive.”
“Well, ‘us’ means Rupert, and Rupert means ‘us;’ you know that.”
There is more of loyalty than grammar in the creed expressed; but as to
the staunchness of the believer’s faith there can be no two opinions.
“Yes, I know.”
If a faint wonder tempers the acquiescence of the hearer, it does not
reach her companion’s ear.
“He had called him ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ in the afternoon; that is always
a very bad sign. Nothing makes Rupert wince so much as being called
‘Rupert of the Rhine.’ ”
Mrs. Darcy’s neck turns a little aside, so as partially to avert a face on
which a scarcely sketched smile that has not much real amusement in it is
dimly visible.
“But things turned out better than I expected,” pursues the girl, with a lilt
of recovering spirits in her not very low but yet agreeable voice. “The dear
old fellow put great constraint upon himself, and was quite civil to—us”—
with a small challenging smile, as she lays an obstinate emphasis upon the
plural pronoun—“and ‘we’ tried our best not to be offensive, and even
asked one or two quite sporting questions, and did not make any very
egregious mistakes.”
The end of her sentence is half drowned in the ringing of a very loud
one-o’clock bell. The Rectory lunches half an hour earlier than the Place.
“I must be off!” cries the visitor, starting up; “and I have never got my
eggs, after all. Ah, here are the children!”
As she speaks, a burst, rather than opened, door announces the entry of
three young creatures between the ages of eight and fourteen, in whose
faces and persons dirt and good looks strive in amicable emulation for the
mastery.
“Miss Brine had to go off again to her sick sister this morning,” says the
mother, in placid explanation. “I do not believe that any one ever had a
governess with so many and such diseased relatives as I,” she laughs; but
her amusement is not echoed by her husband, who, correct and glossy, at
the moment enters the room from his study. On the contrary, he regards
with a fidgety distress the vestures which some unknown quest has dyed in
mud; not even sparing the rosy countenances above them. He testily orders
off his son and daughters at once to change their clothes.
Six protesting eyes turn to the mother, “Need we? It is quite dry,”
exhibiting their caked stockings, petticoats, and trousers.
“You might try what a brush will do,” replies she indifferently,
overriding the paternal fiat.
The compromise is joyfully accepted, and the children drag off Lavinia
with them, partly to aid in their purification, but chiefly to display to her the
evidence of that patriotism which the joyful tidings of yesterday have called
forth. For though averse from soap and water, the Misses and Master Darcy
are avid of military glory, and the walls of the schoolroom, cheerful in its
large shabbiness, are thick with South African heroes. Each child possesses
and displays on the wall photographs of every general of any distinction;
but as there are wide and envenomed differences of estimate as to the
respective places occupied by those warriors in the hierarchy of fame, each
has his or her special favourite enshrined in a showy frame, the centre of a
circle of lesser lights, and the theme of many a wordy battle. To a stranger
not acquainted with the fact that to a cult of glory the Darcy family add a
taste for breeding poultry, and combine the two by naming their favourites
of the farmyard after those of the battle-field, irrespective of differences of
sex, it would be somewhat startling to hear that Colonel Baden-Powell has
just begun to lay, and that General French is “such a good sitter that he can
cover more eggs than any of the others.” But Miss Carew, since the
inception of the campaign, had heard too many eye-opening facts in natural
history of the kind adduced to turn a hair, and having admired the laurel
wreaths beneath which disappears Lord Roberts, who alone of all his
officers is allowed to keep his manhood, and is godfather to the Andalusian
cock, she departs.
Her friend accompanies her to the gate, hatless, and having got rid of the
children by a slight gesture of dismissal, instantly obeyed, despite the bite
of February’s still bitter tooth, that makes the winter aconites in the grass
sink their round yellow heads chillily into their green capes, she loiters even
when the limit of the Rectory demesne is reached; and Lavinia knows that
she has something difficult of utterance to say to her.
“Has Sir George spoken to you about your marriage lately?”
“About my marriage?”
“Yes, anything as to the desirability of its coming off sooner on account
of—what has happened?”
“On account of poor Bill’s death, do you mean?”—looking blank and
mystified. “No; why should he? What difference can that make?”
“You see that Rupert is the only one left now,” replies Mrs. Darcy,
gently, but in a rather embarrassed tone; “the only one to keep up the old
name—to prevent its dying out.”
Her companion is silent, staring at the humpy winter aconites with a
vague feeling that they have grown into unfamiliar blossoms; that the gate-
post is strange too, and the mud in the road, and the rectoress’s expressive
pale face.
“I think he means to broach the subject to you before long,” continues
the latter, looking away from the person whom she is addressing, and
speaking with a tentative delicacy; “so I thought it best that you should not
be taken unawares when he does. I must be off. There is Richard signalling
madly, and saying something quite lay about my unpunctuality.” She runs
off nodding; and Lavinia, much more slowly, takes her way home through
the churchyard.
She feels as if some one—surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up
of sense, sympathy, and esprit?—has given her a blow on the head with a
cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is
perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the future
is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to five minutes ago,
the one has appeared as vague and distant as the other. But to be married to
him soon! To be married to him soon because the Campion family cannot
be allowed to die out! It is by her union with him that it is to be preserved!
It is her child, hers and Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her
very ears tingle and glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the
idea. It is only such a dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s that could
make her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of
reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married to
Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be Rupert’s! Her
feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know whether the prodigious
fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s simple question upon the
sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region of pleasure or pain. She
knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd. The sight—normal and
familiar as it is—of the person who has just been thrust upon her in so
glaringly new a character, the sight of him standing, as he has stood many
hundreds of times before, watching for her back-coming from the verandah,
matter-of-fact and every-day as he looks, does not in the least lessen the
queerness of her sensations.
“The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in his
tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity, “Why,
what have they been doing to you? You look—— I declare I do not know
what you look like.”
“Do not look at me, then,” says she, trying to pass him with a brusque
half-laugh; and, for the first time in her life, feeling uncomfortable beneath
the scrutiny of his surprised eyes.
But he catches her before she can escape. “What have they been doing to
you?”
“They have been telling me that Colonel Baden-Powell has begun to
lay,” replies she, deceitfully.
The confusion of sexes prevalent among the Darcy poultry is too
familiar to the young man to raise a smile. He looses his detaining hold on
his cousin’s sleeve, and there is an accent of resigned distaste in his next
words.
“Of course yesterday’s news has brought on a frightful access of khaki? I
saw the flames of their bonfire insulting the evening sky last night.”
“We ought to have had one too,” she retorts, with a sudden rush of
opposition.
“Have we so much cause to rejoice?” he asks; and there is such
unaffected feeling in his voice that her heart smites her.
The recent emotion and the present one mix and produce her next
sentence.
“You are the only one left now?”
“Yes.” There is a faint inclination of surprise at her truism.
“If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family
would be extinct?”
The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized.
“But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some
maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to
marry yet?”
He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing
argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the question
of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her.
“And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as
if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think that a
woman should not marry before five and twenty!”
“Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive
with a half-distrust.
“Must the Rectory supply all my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing, yet
still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to have any of
my own?”
He shakes his curly head—the head which is never shorn quite close
enough to suit his father’s taste.
“The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of
Susan,” he says, drily.
“She had an idea—built upon, I do not exactly know what”—reddening
faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the lifelong
habit of taking Rupert into her confidence—“that your father—that the
change in—that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make it desirable that we
should——” She stops, jibbing at the matter-of-fact word which yet has
always closed the vista of her lookings into the future as a thing of course.
Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an
awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice.
There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow
goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel walk.
“Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose
agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger.
“Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake off
the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on them
both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t we agree
yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?”
“You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he
says hesitatingly.
“Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame signals;
“but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you to prevent
them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that wretched little pro-
Boer poem in the Shipton Herald was by you; and I detested you when you
said that if by any extraordinary accident you were killed on a battle-field,
your wounds would certainly all be in the back!”
Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.
“I got seven shillings and sixpence for my poem,” he says good-
temperedly. “And as for the battle-field, let us hope that my legs—they are
good long ones—will carry me back unpeppered to your arms.”
CHAPTER IV
Lavinia tries to frown, but the whimsical way in which her cousin utters his
disgraceful aspiration, coupled with her conviction that, if put to the test, he
would prove how little his claim to consummate cowardice was worth,
sends her into the dining-room with a smile on her face. The tone in which
Sir George asks her what the joke is at once extinguishes it.
“Nothing worth repeating,” she answers, grave, though suddenly.
“That means that I am not worth repeating it to!” he rejoins, with an
injured look, and pushing away the dish that is being offered him.
“Won’t you try it?” she asks persuasively. “They are eggs dressed
according to the recipe Lang got from the chef at the Carlton.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t understand any one having an appetite when
they have been penned up in the house all the morning.”
Each of the three persons present, and probably the servants too, know
that the remark is aimed at Rupert, whose sedentary habits are one of his
father’s chiefest grievances against him. It is a besetting sin of the outdoor
members of a family to look upon the indoorness of the indoor as a crime
against themselves. But for once Rupert’s conscience is clear.
“Were not you out, sir?” he asks pleasantly. “How did that come about?
In spite of the sting in the air, one could quite realize that spring is only just
round the corner.”
“I was occupied,” replies Sir George, briefly, not lifting the eyes
overhung by lowering brows to his son’s face from his own empty plate.
Both young people know what his occupation has been—the inditing, by
a slow penman, of an infinitely difficult letter of thanks to the unknown
soldier who had written to tell him of his dead first-born’s last moments,
and the tearing wider of his own yawning wound in the process. There is a
respectful silence; Lavinia regretting her smile, and Rupert his question.
An almost imperceptibly exchanged eye-query between the two juniors
asks what subject it would be safest to start next; and the thought flashes
across Miss Carew of how perfectly Rupert always understands. How could
she have had that odd shock of misgiving half an hour ago as to a union,
however immediate—even if it were to-day or to-morrow—with one who
always understands? And while luncheon proceeds this reassuring
confidence deepens as she notes the tact and temper with which her
betrothed steers among the rocks and quicksands that beset his path. How
skilfully, yet without outraging truth, he conceals the fact that he had
thought the wind cold enough to justify wearing a great-coat—a garment
which is always as a red rag waved before his father’s hardy eyes! With
what smiling self-control he listens to that father’s side-hits at the Molly
Coddle and the Little Englander, though he knows that he is expected to
answer to both names! With what delicate intuition he follows each faintest
hint of a dangerous trend in the talk; and, lastly, with what a masterly air of
naturalness he leads up to that poaching affray in Yorkshire which he had
discovered and which his father had not, lurking in the small type of the
morning paper! How much more thoroughly and subtily he knows Sir
George than poor Bill did!—poor Bill, who could never resist the
temptation to buck and rear under the whip of his father’s jibes! In sanguine
forecast she prophesies to herself that her bufferdom will soon become a
sinecure. If he could but be persuaded to give up that infuriating habit of
jestingly—it must be, and is jestingly—belittling physical courage, and
claiming for himself an absolute lack of it, Lavinia really does not see in
what respect Rupert could be improved. This stout and happy mood lasts
without a break until the repast ends; and upholds her even when her uncle,
with something that seems meaning in his manner, invites her to walk with
him to the keeper’s cottage. Let him broach the subject at once! Thanks to
Susan Darcy, she is prepared; but, even without preparation, there would be
nothing to cause her fear or hesitation. She will be ready with her answer as
soon as he with his question.
“Dear Rupert! That speech about ‘yelping curs’ must have made him
wince; but with what admirable temper and fortitude he bore it! Sir George
himself must have felt a twinge of remorse for it, since, at starting, he had
put his hand kindly on the young fellow’s shoulder, and had said, ‘Do not
be out of the way, my boy, when we come back, as I may want to have a
talk with you.’ And poor Rupert had coloured up with pleasure. Living with
him every day, it is only now and then that one realizes what charming sort
of looks his are.”
For the first half-hour of that walk, to which Miss Carew has thus
valiantly braced herself, it seems as if her resolution were to be wasted,
since her companion’s thoughts are plainly running in a groove other than
that for which Mrs. Darcy has prepared her. He stumps along, digging his
stick into the muddy ground, in that perfect silence which is possible only
to complete intimacy. Not till the high-road is left, and the King’s Wood
entered, does the little business of putting the quivering, tantalized Dachs
Geist on the chain produce a word from him, and then it is only a “Steady,
old man!” to the dog, who with moist nose working and upbraiding eyes, is
testifying against the inhumanity of shackling him just when the sound of
the rabbit begins to be loud in the land.
“Poor Geist!” says Lavinia, stooping to pat the satin of the long, low, red
back. “Wait till we get to Madeley’s, and you shall run the hens!”
This is a promise always made and never fulfilled at the entrance to the
forbidden paradise; but it sends them all on in better spirits. Sir George half
smiles, too, though he says disdainfully—
“Geist!”
The name has been bestowed by Rupert, in memory of Mat Arnold’s
immortal favourite; but as his father is equally unacquainted with the author
and the poem, he can seldom forbear some ejaculation of contempt for so
senseless an appellation; and again the silence is unbroken, as they step
along the ride between the undergrowth of Spanish chestnuts, through
whose still adhering dead leaves the wind blows cracklingly. They are for
use and beauty too, these chestnut growths. To-day they are a covert, warm
and colourful; to-morrow they will be hop-poles, round which the vine of
England will wind the tenderness of her green embrace.
“We must try and get him here!” says Sir George, suddenly, arriving, as
often happens, at a point in his ruminations when utterance to his one
confidant is a relief, and without the slightest doubt that she will have
followed the wordless course of his meditations, and be able to pick up his
thought, whatever it may be, at the moment when he wishes it to become
oral. She is mostly equal to the occasion; and to-day divines at once that the
allusion is to the young officer whom Bill had died to save.
“I am sure that he will wish to come,” she answers, in instantly ready
response.
“You know, of course, to whom I am alluding?” her uncle inquires, with
one of those sharp turns of suspicion, even of her, to which he is liable.
“Surely to Captain Binning,” she replies very softly.
“We have nothing to offer him when he does come,” pursues her
companion, gloomily—“no sport—nothing that a fine manly chap like that
would care for. Twenty years ago it would have been a different thing!”
The sigh on which this speech is wafted tells the girl that her uncle’s
thoughts have gone back to the theme which had made him a sad and bitter
man, even before the loss of his son—that passing of his ancestral acres into
other hands, for which he has to thank his own early excesses.
“If Bobs hurries up the Union Jack over Bloemfontein and Pretoria as
quickly as I expect of him!” cries she, sanguinely, with a kindling eye,
“they may all be back before the summer is over!”
“All!” he repeats, with a reproachful laugh; and she shrinks back into a
remorseful silence. It may be a dim regret at having choked the life out of
her little effort to cheer him that makes Sir George say presently—
“If it were summer-time, he might put up with us for a day or two; and, I
confess, I should like to make his acquaintance. From his letter, I should
gather that he is just my sort—just what I should have liked——”
He breaks off, and her fatal facility in reading his thoughts makes her
hear the unsaid half of the speech quite as plainly as the uttered one. “What
I should have liked Rupert to be!” is the aspiration which he uselessly
forbears to finish. As on many former occasions, her spirit rises in defence.
“Don’t you think,” she asks gently, but with an intonation in which he
recognizes a familiar protest, “that it would be rather dull if we were all
made on precisely the same pattern? built on exactly the same lines?”
“There you go!” retorts he, laughing not quite naturally, yet with less
than his former acridness; “up in arms at once, the moment you think your
precious pet lamb is going to be attacked!”
“It is well that there should be somebody to speak up for him!” she says,
carrying her head rather high, and looking very handsome and plucky.
“He has a bottle-holder whom he can always count upon in you!” replies
Sir George, glowering sideways at her out of an eye in which displeasure at
being opposed, and admiring fondness for the opposer, are at open war.
“Always!” she answers firmly; but, at the same moment, the dignity of
her attitude is compromised by Geist, who, with crooked legs madly
straddling, and choking bark out of a strained-at collar, forces his conductor
into a run in pursuit of some small live thing which has set the dead leaves
astir not a yard from his wildly working nose. Lavinia is a strong girl, but
Geist is also a strong dog, and it takes her a minute or two to re-establish
her supremacy.
“Though Rupert is such a favourite of yours,” says Sir George, with a
deliberation which shows that the remark is not an impromptu, “it does not
strike me that you are in any violent hurry to marry him.”
The expected has come—the fully prepared and waited for, yet it must
take her at an undefended angle. Possibly it is something jibing in the shape
of the question that chills away her carefully pre-constructed response.
“Does whatever in the shape of an engagement once existed between
you still hold good? or have you put an end to it?”
The something of hurry and apprehension that she detects in his voice,
and in which she recognizes his last bid for possible happiness, affects her
so strongly that she can only give a nod, which is apparently of so doubtful
an interpretation that he misunderstands it.
“Do not be afraid to tell me if you have,” he goes on with what she
knows to be an unusual effort at self-control and temper. “I shall be the last
person to blame you. I never could quite understand what you——”
“We belong to each other still: we always shall,” she interrupts, in a low
firm voice, hastening to stop the mouth that is about to utter a too familiar
formula.
A sort of relief spreads over the lined face beside her; yet there is a
cavilling discontent in his repetition of her phrase.
“Belong to each other! Well, you have done that, I suppose, according to
your ideas, since you were both in long clothes.”
She pauses, and a cloud seems to pass before her clear strong eyes;
pauses with the feeling—an unaccountably heavy one—of being about to
do something absolutely irrevocable, then speaks.
“Do you wish us to marry soon?”
He shoots a look at her to make sure that she is in earnest.
“I wish for a grandson!” he answers crudely.
Again she pauses, chiding herself as squeamish for a return of that
sensation of repulsion which had assailed her when first the practical aspect
of her relation to Rupert had been suggested to her by Mrs. Darcy. She has
not conquered it when her uncle repeats and enlarges his phrase.
“I wish before I die to see a grandson growing up, with as much of you
and as little of Rupert in him as you can make him!”
She listens with a half-shivering docility. Is it the strangeness, the
something of coarse and homely in the wording of her uncle’s wish, that
gives her this prudish and unreasonable sense of disrelish?
“No doubt you are laughing at the idea of wanting an heir when there is
so preciously little left to be heir to,” continues Sir George, in a key half
angry at her delay in acquiescence, half appealing to her mercy. “But when
you have got one spot of earth into your very bones, you do not like the idea
of being quite wiped off from it.”
Their steps have led them to a clearing in the low wood, and over the
ground bared by the woodman’s axe the old man’s eye, mournful and
yearning, wanders, embracing the pleasant swelling hills, the strawberry
gardens, and cherry orchards, upon which his sire’s eyes, nay, his own
boyish ones, had rested possessively. A Jew broker’s improved ploughs are
furrowing yon hillside; a Half-penny Comic Journal sends the strawberries
to Covent Garden; but to his own sad heart, pasture and copse and red roof-
tree, are Campion’s still. Lavinia’s eye follows the direction her uncle’s has
taken. The Kentish landscape, with its rustic smile is nearly as dear, though
not as melancholy, to her as to him. The idea of living in any other
surroundings is as unfamiliar to her as the wish. “The thing that hath been
shall be.” To go on living and doing for her men—since there are now only
two left, she must make the most of them—what other fate has ever
occurred to her as possible? For as long as she can remember the thought of
what she herself would like has been always subordinated to the wishes,
divined or expressed, of her menkind. In so small a thing as the ordering of
dinner, has her own palate ever in half a score of years, been asked to give
an assent or a veto?
To marry Rupert! To bear and bring up his children—a transient wonder
crosses her mind as to whether there is any likelihood of their being as
amusing and original as the young Darcys!—for what other end was she
created? There is no sting or thrill in her feeling for him; but is it the worse
for that? There are women incapable of thrilling for any man—a large, cool,
comfortable class, to which she does and must belong. Has her pulse ever
paid any man the tribute of one quickened beat? Proudly to herself she can
answer No. She is not of that kind. With Féodorovna Prince as an object-
lesson, there is not much fear of her erring in the direction of passion or
sentimentality. She involuntarily lifts her head a little above its usual level
—though it is always handsomely carried—and, since the thought-current
that has run through her brain has done so with lightning’s own speed, there
is to her hearer’s ear scarcely any delay in her answer.
“I am ready to marry Rupert whenever you and he wish me to.”
Her voice is steady and serene; at least so she intends and believes it to
be. Yet Sir George looks at her askance.
“Ready!” he repeats distrustfully. “A man, if he has any pluck, may be
ready to go to the gallows!”
Lavinia makes a face between a laugh and a frown.
“Choose your own words,” she says, the habit of a lifetime controlling
and smoothing away any outward expression of impatience.
But he will not let her off. “Are you glad to marry him? Do you feel that
it is essential to your happiness?” he asks, pressing home his inquiries with
a persistency that he imagines to be conscientious, but which she feels to be
cruel and perverse.
“Glad!” she repeats, dragging out the word a little, to give herself time to
find the right phrase of tactful truth. “Haven’t I always been glad that I was
to be part and parcel of you both? My gladness is no shoddy new thing.”
He looks at her captiously, the unhappy bent of his disposition causing
him to feel a half-distrust of the candid eyes and the honest voice that yet
always bring a warmth about his heart.
“If Rupert does not marry you, he will probably marry some one else,”
he growls. “And between you and me, I cannot quite depend on his taste!”
It is said with no wounding intention. Never would it have occurred to
the father that any one could take exception against him for making
disparaging comments on his own son of his body begotten; but used as she
is to them, never does Lavinia fail to protest.
“I like his taste,” she answers pleasantly and gallantly. “He thinks me
very good-looking.”
But her companion’s thought stumps undistracted by her playfulness
along its own track, as doggedly as his feet along the bridle-path.
“I am not difficult to get on with,” he says, in a naïf unconsciousness of
his own corners which makes his niece throttle a smile. “No one can deny
that I am easy to live with; but I could not answer for myself if he sprang
upon me some demi-rep from a music-hall or some screeching platform
woman. I declare to goodness”—lashing himself up into unreasonable
anger—“it seems an odd thing for a father to say, but I know so little of the
fellow—of what goes on inside him—that I could not say, if I were to be
shot for it, which alternative is the more likely one.”
It would be perfectly useless to tell him that it is he himself who has
crushed the power of confidence out of his son; and the desire to impart the
information to him is at once stamped upon by Lavinia. All that is left of it
escapes in a patient sigh, and the little dry sentence—
“I should say that they were about equally probable.”
“I have a still better reason for wishing to see you coupled together,”
continues Sir George, a little appeased, though not in the least, suspecting
the exercise of self-control that has tightened Lavinia’s lips, and
strengthened her grip upon Geist’s lead. “If you do not marry my boy, of
course you will never rest till you marry some one else’s.”
“Never rest till I marry some one else’s!” repeats she, indignantly, all her
virgin pride up in arms; but in a second her wrath falls, vanquished by
native sweetness, and by a long and sore acquaintance with the properties of
Uncle George’s jokes. To-day it is not quite a joke. It is the vehicle for a
real apprehension. She is paid for her self-government in a ready money
which does not often distinguish the discharge of debts to virtue.
“And then I should lose my little mosquito,” he says, employing a phrase
of no visible aptness to the tall and gracious creature beside him, which she
yet welcomes as a proof of peculiar favour. “No doubt my loss would be
your gain, as people say when other people’s relatives die”—laughing
uncontagiously. “But I do not think I could carry creditably anything more
just yet. You see I have lost a good deal one way and another.”
There is pathos in his growling voice, and appeal in his shagged eyes,
and Lavinia at once feels that she would gladly die for him.
“It is settled, then!” she cries with a cheerfulness concerning which she
is not quite sure whether she feels it or not. “Rupert marries Lavinia to
prevent her marrying any one else, and Lavinia marries Rupert to prevent
his marrying any one else, and the bells ring, and we are all happy for ever
after!”

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The Neuroscience of Expertise 1st

Edition Merim Bilali■

The Neuroscience of Expertise 1st Edition Merim Bilali■

Chess Explained The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition Sam Collins

Starting Out The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition John Emms

The Neuroscience of Intelligence Cambridge Fundamentals

The Neuroscience of Adolescence 1st Edition Adriana

Phenomenology of Bioethics Technoethics and Lived

Meltdown and the Neuroscience of Stress 1st Edition

The Neuroscience of Dementia 1st Edition Colin R.

Merim Bilalić is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Forthcoming Titles in the Series

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

1 Introduction to Research on Expertise 1

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2.4.2 Radiological Expertise 58

3 Cognitive Expertise 100

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3.5.3 Memory and Problem Solving in Expertise 141

4 Motor Expertise 170

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5 The Road to Expertise 223

Key Terms 252

Color plates are to be found between pp. 144 and 145

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

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A1 – primary auditory area

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PMv – premotor cortex ventral

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Introduction to Research on Expertise

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1.2 Definition of Expertise and Its Domains

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the environments. Pathological elements in radiology rarely change; the

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316026847.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

outstanding performance, they need to go beyond the available visual

1.3 Cognitive Mechanisms in Expertise

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1.3.1 Perceptual and Cognitive Expertise

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We find the same situation in the seemingly more cognitive domain of

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A popular explanation is that they can calculate and foresee numerous

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Box 1.1 The Curse of Expertise, or Why Do Good Thoughts

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Box 1.1 (cont.)