L’acquisition de l’expertise ou l’abandon progressif du renforcement des processus génériques

The repetition of multitasking episodes leads to a reinforcement of the generic and specific processes solicited, resulting in an improvement of the performance in these same tasks, up to a final state which corresponds to expertise. However, the expert's performance is attributed to processes considered as “domain specific”. Thus, the reinforcement of generic processes developed during the pathway to expertise seems to have disappeared. What happened to the reinforced generic processes? This review articulates several discrete theoretical fields: that of expertise acquisition (Logan, 1988), acquired expertise (Gobet & Simon, 1996), dual-task situations (Pashler, 1994) and executive functions (Miyake et al., 2000). We show that it is possible to envisage reinforcement of executive functions throughout the process of developing expertise and we propose that this reinforcement ceases when expertise is acquired.