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

Mindfulness can benefit athletes’ mindset and performance. These benefits may be enhanced by sport-specific mindfulness interventions. Accordingly, our objectives were 2-fold: first, to develop a rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, and second, to investigate its effects on mindfulness, flow, reinvestment, and rowing performance. Rowers were randomly assigned to either a 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, which included generic and rowing-specific practices, or a control group. Rowers completed pre-test and post-test measures of performance, mindfulness, flow, and rowing-specific reinvestment. Lastly, rowers completed an evaluation form (...) following the intervention. The results demonstrated that the intervention group increased flow, mindfulness, and improved performance, additionally conscious motor processing decreased from pre-test to post-test. However, the intervention did not preferentially change mindfulness or reinvestment compared to control. Participants provided favorable feedback and evaluated the intervention positively. Our 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention promoted flow, encouraged mindfulness, and aided performance. Thus, we provide preliminary explorative evidence that a sport-specific mindfulness intervention can benefit athletes. We recommend that future research, with large sample sizes and improved home practice, should examine mediators and moderators of the mindfulness-performance relationship. (shrink)

Disjunctivists maintain that perceptual experiences and hallucinatory experiences are distinct kinds of event with different metaphysical natures. Moreover, given their view about the nature of perceptual cases, disjunctivists must deny that the perceptual kind of experience can occur during hallucination. However, it is widely held that disjunctivists must grant the converse claim, to the effect that the hallucinatory kind of experience occurs even during perception. This paper challenges that thought. As we will see, the argument for thinking that the hallucinatory (...) kind of experience is present even in cases of perception depends on prior acceptance of a ‘non-demanding’ conception of hallucination, on which all it takes to produce an hallucinatory experience is to induce in the subject the right kind of neurological condition. On the view developed here, by contrast, there are substantive causal conditions, going beyond the mere occurrence of the right kind of neurological state, that must be met if an experience of the hallucinatory kind is to occur. By drawing on this view, I argue, disjunctivists can deny that the kind of experience involved in hallucination ever occurs during perception. This then allows disjunctivists to avoid certain important problems they would otherwise face. It also leaves them with considerably more freedom when it comes to theorising about the nature of hallucinatory experience. (shrink)