Expertise and its development

Hypothesis: When one learns a new task she is automatically at an early stage of development in that domain. How early depends to a great extent on how many of the component skills have already been developed. Children are universal novices. They have not developed very many of the component skills needed for any domain. Under this perspective decalage is the order of the day; many of the skills needed for almost any task are relatively domain specific. (Micki Chi.).
        Some examples of domains in which there are novices and experts: playing chess, looking at blood slides, listening to music, looking at an x-ray, looking at 3-D pictures, riding a bicycle, skiing. dancing, gymnastics, solving physics problems, walking, reading, riding a bicycle, driving a car, dancing, typing, computer programming, cab driving, radiology, medical diagnosis, playing a piano, violin, basketball, baseball, football, gymnastics, golf, writing papers, taking tests. An important unanswered question is what is a domain? Also, how are different domains related to one another?

Knowledge and skills:
When novices start to learn, the information first tends to be represented as independent simple propositions and procedures. The process of gaining expertise is, in part, creating larger relatively coherent structures that can incorporate these propositions or procedures as parts. Mayer divides relevant knowledge up into several categories that more or less hold across domains. (a) factual e.g. statements of relations between elements, e.g. equations, (b) syntactic--recognize appropriate forms, (c) semantic--identifying the relevant concepts, (d) schematic--identifying the equivalence classes across different concepts, (e) strategic--approach or strategy for attempting to solve problems.
Depending on the particular domain or task within the domain, some of this knowledge can be cognitively accessed, but some of it, e.g. motor procedures, may not be directly available to symbolic representation.