Cognitive control

Abstract

What role might intuition and deliberation play during the performance of well-learned skills? Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ (1986) influential phenomenological analysis of skill-acquisition proposes that expert performance is guided by non-cognitive responses which are fast, effortless, and intuitive in nature. Although Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) recognize that, on occasions (e.g. when performance goes awry for some reason), a form of ‘detached deliberative rationality’ may be used by experts to improve their performance, they see no role for calculative problem solving or deliberation (i.e. drawing on rules or mental representations) when performance is going well. The current chapter counters this argument by drawing on empirical evidence and phenomenological description to argue that skilled performers use cognitive control (an executive function) across a range of sporting situations (i.e. in training, pre-performance routines, on-line skill execution) in order to maintain and enhance performance proficiency.