Lecture: Prof. Dr. Merim Bilalic - “Experts’ Errors – Window into Human Mind”

Experts are people who consistently produce outstanding performance in a certain domain. As such, they rarely make mistakes. Here I will argue that experts’ mistakes hold the key to understanding the human mind. In a series of examples from domains as diverse as chess, engineering design, fingerprint inspection, and medical diagnosis, I will draw the parallels about the cognitive mechanism responsible for the rare slips of experts. I will then demonstrate that the mechanism behind experts’ errors is a side effect of the otherwise highly efficient mechanism that enables experts to deal with the situations from their domain.