Halpern Diane F, Wai Jonathan
Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA, USA.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2007 Jun;13(2):79-94. doi: 10.1037/1076-898X.13.2.79.
Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings, suggesting that expertise develops with practice. To determine the effect of hours of practice (M = 1,904), the authors compared experts with high-achieving college students on a battery of cognitive tests. Despite reporting that they usually memorize word lists without learning meanings, experts defined more words correctly. Reaction times on a lexical decision task (controlling for age) correlated with expertise ratings, suggesting that experts develop faster access to word identification. Experts' superiority on visuospatial processing was found for reaction time on 1 of 3 visuospatial tests. In a study of memory for altered Scrabble boards, experts outperformed novices, with differences between high and low expertise on memory for boards with structure-deforming transformations. Expert Scrabble players showed superior performance on selected verbal and visuospatial tasks that correspond to abilities that are implicated in competitive play.
竞技拼字游戏玩家平均每周花费4.5小时从官方拼字游戏词典中记忆单词。当被问及在学习单词列表时是否会学习单词的含义时，只有6.4%的人回答“总是”，其余的人则分为“有时”和“很少或从不”。游戏年限与专业水平评分呈正相关，这表明专业技能是通过练习发展而来的。为了确定练习时长（M = 1904）的影响，作者在一系列认知测试中比较了专家和成绩优异的大学生。尽管专家们表示他们通常在记忆单词列表时不学习单词的含义，但他们能正确定义更多的单词。词汇判断任务中的反应时间（控制年龄因素）与专业水平评分相关，这表明专家能够更快地识别单词。在三项视觉空间测试中的一项测试中，发现专家在视觉空间处理方面的反应时间更具优势。在一项关于记忆变形拼字游戏棋盘的研究中，专家的表现优于新手，在记忆具有结构变形的棋盘方面，高专业水平和低专业水平之间存在差异。专业拼字游戏玩家在与竞技游戏相关的特定语言和视觉空间任务中表现出色。
