Mental Representations

Notes

Claim

Mental Representations are our way to efficiently store, search and find information in our Human Brain. Those are created by converting knowledge into visual representations. One-time effort investment yields future benefits.

Explanation

Therefore, knowledge and expertise is having more relevant mental representations, a set of Heuristics are mental shortcuts enabling fast automatic decisions and "cheat sheets", in your given field.

Similarly, envisioning yourself doing a task before actually doing it improves your performance, like a form of Simulations provide safe practice environments to test and learn. Some preformers do these visualizations as a ritual every time before they begin.

Why it matters

Examples

For example, the expertise of chess masters doesn't stem from analyzing more moves ahead than everyone else, but rather the have memorized more board configurations which connects to a certain series of moves. They will intuitively sense what is the correct move based on the board configuration Intuition is trained expertise converted to automatic response.

Supporters

Additionally, they tested whether chess masters remember board configurations better. They did when it was a board layout that made sense, but not when it was a random order.

Opposers

Open questions

Visual