Survey results of members with National Scrabble Association Ratings versus college students at a liberal arts college who have played Scrabble at some point but have never competed.
| Variables | Scrabble experts | College students |
|---|---|---|
| Number of people | 114 | 147 |
| Ave. days per year spent playing scrabble | 221.37 | 8.1 |
| <strong>Questions</strong> | <strong>Scrabble experts answering yes</strong> | <strong>College students answering yes</strong> |
| Have you ever studied words from the <em>Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary</em> or a similar source? | 99% | 5% |
| Are there words that you know are legal in Scrabble, but you do not know what the word means? | 89% | 26% |
| When you play Scrabble do you <strong>always</strong> keep track of the letters that have been played, so you know if you are likely to get a rare letter that you might need? | 80% | 4.8% |
| When your opponent has the Scrabble board facing him or her, do you sometimes mentally rotate the board to imagine what it would look like if it were facing you? | 17% | 38% |
| When you think about the layout of Scrabble boards, do you know the point value for every square on the board (e.g. double or triple word/letter score tiles?) | 70% | 3% |
This passage is adapted from David Z. Hambrick, “Winning SCRABBLE and the Nature of Expertise,” (c)2015 Scientific American.
SCRABBLE has been one of the most popular board games
in the world for decades. And, now, as an increasingly popular
domain for scientific research on expertise, it is giving
psychologists a better understanding of the underpinnings of
complex skill and a clearer picture of the origins of greatness.
The overarching goal of this research is to better understand the
interplay between “software” and “hardware” aspects of the
cognitive system. Software factors include knowledge and
skills that are acquired through experience, whereas hardware
factors include genetically-influenced abilities and capacities.
SCRABBLE is ideal for research on how these factors interact
not only because it is relatively easy to find research
participants from a wide range of skill, but because it can be
imported into the lab.
The basic goal of SCRABBLE is to create intersecting
words by placing lettered tiles on a board containing a 15 x 15
grid. Knowledge is, of course, critical for success in this task.
If you want to become a great SCRABBLE player, first and
foremost, you have to know a lot of words. You also need to be
adept at identifying potential plays. Finally, you have to know
SCRABBLE strategy—or what aficionados call “rack
management”—such as how to keep a good mix of consonants
and vowels.
People aren’t born with this type of specialized knowledge.
Research indicates that we may come into the world equipped
with the building blocks for complex skills such as math, but
certainly nothing as specific as knowledge of words in a
particular language. Thus, experience is necessary to become
an expert in SCRABBLE. And, in fact, SCRABBLE skill has
been found to correlate positively with the amount of time
people spend engaging in SCRABBLE-related activities. In
one study, using official SCRABBLE rating as an objective
measure of skill, researchers found that groups of “elite” and
“average” SCRABBLE players differed in the amount of time
they had devoted to things like studying word lists, analyzing
previous SCRABBLE games, and anagramming—and not by a
little. Overall, the elite group had spent an average of over
5,000 hours on SCRABBLE study, compared to only about
1,300 hours for the average group.
Clearly, expert SCRABBLE players are to some degree
“made.” But there is evidence that basic cognitive abilities play
a role, too. In a study recently published in Applied Cognitive
Psychology, Michael Toma and his colleagues found that elite
SCRABBLE players outperformed college students from a
highly selective university on tests of two cognitive abilities:
working memory and visuospatial reasoning. Working memory
is the ability to hold in mind information while using it to solve
a problem, as when iterating through possible moves in a
SCRABBLE game. Visuospatial reasoning is the ability to
visualize things and to detect patterns, as when imagining how
tiles on a SCRABBLE board would intersect after a certain
play. Both abilities are influenced by genetic factors.
Further evidence pointing to a role of these abilities in
SCRABBLE expertise comes from a recent brain imaging
study by Andrea Protzner and her colleagues at the University
of Calgary. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), these researchers recorded the brain activity of
SCRABBLE players and control subjects as they performed a
task in which they were shown groups of letters and judged
whether they formed words. (fMRI measures brain activity by
detecting changes in blood flow within different regions of the
brain.) The major finding of this study was that competitive
SCRABBLE players recruited brain regions associated with
working memory and visual perception to perform this task to a
greater degree than the control subjects did.
What might explain SCRABBLE experts’ superiority in
working memory and visuospatial reasoning? For the same
basic reason that basketball players tend to be tall, a likely
explanation is that people high in working memory and
visuospatial reasoning abilities are people who tend to get into,
and persist at, playing SCRABBLE: because it gives them an
advantage in the game. This explanation fits with what
behavioral geneticists call gene-environment correlation, which
is the idea that our genetic makeup influences our experiences.
These findings add to an emerging understanding of
complex skill that may ultimately bring expertise within reach
of a larger number of people than is currently the case.
SCRABBLE has been one of the most popular board games
in the world for decades. And, now, as an increasingly popular
domain for scientific research on expertise, it is giving
psychologists a better understanding of the underpinnings of
complex skill and a clearer picture of the origins of greatness.
The overarching goal of this research is to better understand the
interplay between “software” and “hardware” aspects of the
cognitive system. Software factors include knowledge and
skills that are acquired through experience, whereas hardware
factors include genetically-influenced abilities and capacities.
SCRABBLE is ideal for research on how these factors interact
not only because it is relatively easy to find research
participants from a wide range of skill, but because it can be
imported into the lab.
The basic goal of SCRABBLE is to create intersecting
words by placing lettered tiles on a board containing a 15 x 15
grid. Knowledge is, of course, critical for success in this task.
If you want to become a great SCRABBLE player, first and
foremost, you have to know a lot of words. You also need to be
adept at identifying potential plays. Finally, you have to know
SCRABBLE strategy—or what aficionados call “rack
management”—such as how to keep a good mix of consonants
and vowels.
People aren’t born with this type of specialized knowledge.
Research indicates that we may come into the world equipped
with the building blocks for complex skills such as math, but
certainly nothing as specific as knowledge of words in a
particular language. Thus, experience is necessary to become
an expert in SCRABBLE. And, in fact, SCRABBLE skill has
been found to correlate positively with the amount of time
people spend engaging in SCRABBLE-related activities. In
one study, using official SCRABBLE rating as an objective
measure of skill, researchers found that groups of “elite” and
“average” SCRABBLE players differed in the amount of time
they had devoted to things like studying word lists, analyzing
previous SCRABBLE games, and anagramming—and not by a
little. Overall, the elite group had spent an average of over
5,000 hours on SCRABBLE study, compared to only about
1,300 hours for the average group.
Clearly, expert SCRABBLE players are to some degree
“made.” But there is evidence that basic cognitive abilities play
a role, too. In a study recently published in Applied Cognitive
Psychology, Michael Toma and his colleagues found that elite
SCRABBLE players outperformed college students from a
highly selective university on tests of two cognitive abilities:
working memory and visuospatial reasoning. Working memory
is the ability to hold in mind information while using it to solve
a problem, as when iterating through possible moves in a
SCRABBLE game. Visuospatial reasoning is the ability to
visualize things and to detect patterns, as when imagining how
tiles on a SCRABBLE board would intersect after a certain
play. Both abilities are influenced by genetic factors.
Further evidence pointing to a role of these abilities in
SCRABBLE expertise comes from a recent brain imaging
study by Andrea Protzner and her colleagues at the University
of Calgary. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), these researchers recorded the brain activity of
SCRABBLE players and control subjects as they performed a
task in which they were shown groups of letters and judged
whether they formed words. (fMRI measures brain activity by
detecting changes in blood flow within different regions of the
brain.) The major finding of this study was that competitive
SCRABBLE players recruited brain regions associated with
working memory and visual perception to perform this task to a
greater degree than the control subjects did.
What might explain SCRABBLE experts’ superiority in
working memory and visuospatial reasoning? For the same
basic reason that basketball players tend to be tall, a likely
explanation is that people high in working memory and
visuospatial reasoning abilities are people who tend to get into,
and persist at, playing SCRABBLE: because it gives them an
advantage in the game. This explanation fits with what
behavioral geneticists call gene-environment correlation, which
is the idea that our genetic makeup influences our experiences.
These findings add to an emerging understanding of
complex skill that may ultimately bring expertise within reach
of a larger number of people than is currently the case.