Questions 1-11 are based on the following
passage.
This passage is adapted from David Z. Hambrick, “Winning SCRABBLE and the Nature of Expertise,” ©2015 Scientific American.
SCRABBLE has been one of the most popular board
games in the world for decades. And, now, as an increasingly
popular domain for scientific research on expertise, it is
giving psychologists a better understanding of the
5 underpinnings of complex skill and a clearer picture of the
origins of greatness. The overarching goal of this research is
to better understand the interplay between “software”and
“hardware” aspects of the cognitive system. Software factors
include knowledge and skills that are acquired through
10 experience, whereas hardware factors include genetically-
influenced abilities and capacities. SCRABBLE is ideal for
research on how these factors interact not only because it is
relatively easy to find research participants from a wide
range of skill, but because it can be imported into the lab.
15 The basic goal of SCRABBLE is to create intersecting
words by placing lettered tiles on a board containing a 15 x
15 grid. Knowledge is, of course, critical for success in this
task. If you want to become a great SCRABBLE player, first
and foremost, you have to know a lot of words. You also
20 need to be adept at identifying potential plays. Finally, you
have to know SCRABBLE strategy—or what aficionados
call “rack management”—such as how to keep a good mix of
consonants and vowels.
People aren’t born with this type of specialized
25 knowledge. Research indicates that we may come into the
world equipped with the building blocks for complex skills
such as math, but certainly nothing as specific as knowledge
of words in a particular language. Thus, experience is
necessary to become an expert in SCRABBLE. And, in fact,
30 SCRABBLE skill has been found to correlate positively with
the amount of time people spend engaging in SCRABBLE-
related activities. In one study, using official SCRABBLE
rating as an objective measure of skill, researchers found that
groups of “elite” and “average” SCRABBLE players differed
35 in the amount of time they had devoted to things like
studying word lists, analyzing previous SCRABBLE games,
and anagramming—and not by a little. Overall, the elite
group had spent an average of over 5,000 hours on
SCRABBLE study, compared to only about 1,300 hours for
40 the average group.
Clearly, expert SCRABBLE players are to some degree
“made.” But there is evidence that basic cognitive abilities
play a role, too. In a study recently published in Applied
Cognitive Psychology, Michael Toma and his colleagues
45 found that elite SCRABBLE players outperformed college
students from a highly selective university on tests of two
cognitive abilities: working memory and visuospatial
reasoning. Working memory is the ability to hold in mind
information while using it to solve a problem, as when
50 iterating through possible moves in a SCRABBLE game.
Visuospatial reasoning is the ability to visualize things and to
detect patterns, as when imagining how tiles on a
SCRABBLE board would intersect after a certain play. Both
abilities are influenced by genetic factors.
Further evidence pointing to a role of these abilities in
55 SCRABBLE expertise comes from a recent brain imaging
study by Andrea Protzner and her colleagues at the
University of Calgary. Using functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), these researchers recorded the brain activity
60 of SCRABBLE players and control subjects as they
performed a task in which they were shown groups of letters
and judged whether they formed words. (fMRI measures
brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow within
different regions of the brain.) The major finding of this
65 study was that competitive SCRABBLE players recruited
brain regions associated with working memory and visual
perception to perform this task to a greater degree than the
control subjects did.
What might explain SCRABBLE experts’ superiority in
70 working memory and visuospatial reasoning? For the same
basic reason that basketball players tend to be tall, a likely
explanation is that people high in working memory and
visuospatial reasoning abilities are people who tend to get
into, and persist at, playing SCRABBLE: because it gives
75 them an advantage in the game. This explanation fits with
what behavioral geneticists call gene-environment
correlation, which is the idea that our genetic makeup
influences our experiences.
These findings add to an emerging understanding of
80 complex skill that may ultimately bring expertise within
reach of a larger number of people than is currently the case.
* Changed for cultural accuracy.