Arsal Güler, Suss Joel, Ward Paul, Ta Vivian, Ringer Ryan, Eccles David W
Envision Research Institute, Envision, Inc., Wichita, KS, United States.
Department of Psychology, Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Oct 29;12:730985. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.730985. eCollection 2021.
The study of the sociology of scientific knowledge distinguishes between contributory and interactional experts. Contributory experts have practical expertise-they can "walk the walk." Interactional experts have internalized the tacit components of expertise-they can "talk the talk" but are not able to reliably "walk the walk." Interactional expertise permits effective communication between contributory experts and others (e.g., laypeople), which in turn facilitates working jointly toward shared goals. Interactional expertise is attained through long-term immersion into the expert community in question. To assess interactional expertise, researchers developed the imitation game-a variant of the Turing test-to test whether a person, or a particular group, possesses interactional expertise of another. The imitation game, which has been used mainly in sociology to study the social nature of knowledge, may also be a useful tool for researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of expertise. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the imitation game and apply it to examine interactional expertise in the context of blindness. Specifically, we examined blind and sighted individuals' ability to imitate each other in a street-crossing scenario. In Phase I, blind and sighted individuals provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with crossing a street-once while imitating the other group (i.e., as a pretender) and once responding genuinely (i.e., as a non-pretender). In Phase II, transcriptions of the reports were judged as either genuine or imitated responses by a different set of blind and sighted participants, who also provided the reasoning for their decisions. The judges comprised blind individuals, sighted orientation-and-mobility specialists, and sighted individuals with infrequent socialization with blind individuals. Decision data were analyzed using probit mixed models for signal-detection-theory indices. Reasoning data were analyzed using natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques. The results revealed evidence that interactional expertise (i.e., relevant tacit knowledge) can be acquired by immersion in the group that possesses and produces the expert knowledge. The modified imitation game can be a useful research tool for measuring interactional expertise within a community of practice and evaluating practitioners' understanding of true experts.
科学知识社会学的研究区分了贡献型专家和互动型专家。贡献型专家拥有实践专长——他们能够“身体力行”。互动型专家已经内化了专长的隐性成分——他们能够“夸夸其谈”，但却无法可靠地“身体力行”。互动专长使贡献型专家与其他人（如外行）之间能够进行有效的沟通，这反过来又有助于朝着共同目标开展合作。互动专长是通过长期融入相关专家群体而获得的。为了评估互动专长，研究人员开发了模仿游戏——图灵测试的一个变体——来测试一个人或特定群体是否具备对另一个群体的互动专长。模仿游戏主要在社会学中用于研究知识的社会性质，对于专注于专长认知方面的研究人员来说，它也可能是一个有用的工具。在本文中，我们介绍了模仿游戏的一个修改版本，并将其应用于考察失明背景下的互动专长。具体而言，我们考察了盲人和视力正常的个体在过马路场景中相互模仿的能力。在第一阶段，盲人和视力正常的个体提供了与过马路相关的思维过程的口头报告——一次是模仿另一组（即作为伪装者），一次是真实作答（即作为非伪装者）。在第二阶段，由另一组盲人和视力正常的参与者将报告的文字记录判断为真实或模仿的回答，他们还为自己的决定提供了理由。评判人员包括盲人个体、视力正常的定向与移动专家，以及与盲人个体很少交往的视力正常的个体。使用信号检测理论指标的数据采用概率混合模型进行分析。推理数据采用自然语言处理（NLP）技术进行分析。结果表明，通过融入拥有并产生专家知识的群体，可以获得互动专长（即相关的隐性知识）。修改后的模仿游戏可以成为一个有用的研究工具，用于衡量实践社区内的互动专长，并评估从业者对真正专家的理解。
