On the Importance of Mental Time Frames: A Case for the Need of Empirical Methods to Investigate Adaptive Expertise

It has been suggested by Holyoak (1991) that research on expertise can be divided into three generations. The first two focused on expertise as heuristic search and expertise as refined routines. The third generation acknowledges the adaptive character of expertise, which is the topic discussed here. We take as the starting point the operational definition of adaptive expertise, and the three key elements of adaptive performance for individuals and teams recently suggested by Hutton et al. (2017). This definition captures the essence of this skill; we however suggest that the key definition needs further elaboration. We reason that understanding and achievement are perhaps best understood in terms of action-recognition cycles. In addition, empirical examples from five different domains are used to show how time pressure affects self-monitoring and regulates experts' cognitive strategies. We propose that mental time frames explain how, and how well, domain experts in naturalistic decision situations manage different kinds of time pressure. In our field research, utilising the collegial verbalisation (CV) method, we have found evidence for use of mental time frames in experts' decision making processes. We suggest that CV, along with the use of conspective protocols, is both a robust method and an innovative approach for collecting data in naturalistic decision making research. This method can help identify individual differences which are an important source in understanding adaptive expertise.