Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E (...) accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise, we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. (shrink)

In this work, we evaluate the status of both theory and empirical evidence in the field of experimental rest-break research based on a framework that combines mental-chronometry and psychometric-measurement theory. To this end, we provide a taxonomy of rest breaks according to which empirical studies can be classified. Then, we evaluate the theorizing in both the basic and applied fields of research and explain how popular concepts relate to each other in contemporary theoretical debates. Here, we highlight differences between all (...) these models in the light of two symbolic categories, termed the resource-based and satiation-based model, including aspects related to the dynamics and the control mechanisms at work. Based on a critical assessment of existing methodological and theoretical approaches, we finally provide a set of guidelines for both theory building and future empirical approaches to the experimental study of rest breaks. We conclude that a psychometrically advanced and theoretically focused research of rest and recovery has the potential to finally provide a sound scientific basis to eventually mitigate the adverse effects of ever increasing task demands on performance and well-being in a multitasking world at work and leisure. (shrink)

Here we present a systematic plan to the experimental study of test–retest reliability in the multitasking domain, adopting the multitrait-multimethod approach to evaluate the psychometric properties of performance in Düker-type speeded multiple-act mental arithmetic. These form of tasks capacitate the experimental analysis of integrated multi-step processing by combining multiple mental operations in flexible ways in the service of the overarching goal of completing the task. A particular focus was on scoring methodology, particularly measures of response speed variability. To this end, (...) we present data of two experiments with regard to test–retest reliability, between-measures correlational structure, and stability. Finally, we compared participants with high versus low performance variability to assess ability-related differences in measurement precision, which is especially relevant in the applied fields of clinical neuropsychology. The participants performed two classic integrated multi-act arithmetic tasks, combining addition and verification and addition and comparison. The results revealed excellent test–retest reliability for the standard and the variability measures. The analysis of between-measures correlational structure revealed the typical pattern of convergent and discriminant relationships, and also, that absolute response speed variability was highly correlated with average speed, indicating that these measures mainly deliver redundant information. In contrast, speed-adjusted variability revealed discriminant validity being correlated to a much lesser degree with average speed, indicating that this measure delivers additional information not already provided by the speed measure. Furthermore, speed-adjusted variability was virtually unaffected by test–retest practice, which makes this measure interesting in situations with repeated testing. (shrink)